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COI
Tuesday, 2 December 2008
Central Office of Information:
At a time when focus on costs is key to all businesses and the worry of redundancy hovers over employees and employers alike I find the messages I am being bombarded with from the COI absolutely flabbergasting.
Having spent the weekend at friends who have moved to ST Ives in Cornwall I was faced with at 287 mile trek back to sunny staffordshire on Sunday. Being a slave ot my art, i decided to eject my Drifters CD and review the quality of the commercial radio world travelling through many different counties and transmission areas.
My first observation was just how much of our Sunday commercial radio offerings are not regional at all but networked programmes beamed from within the M25. This is worrying state of affairs when considering 80% of the market is now owned by just 3 companies. I am concerned we will see more of this networking creep into the scheduling to cut costs and again lose our regionality offerings.
However the quality was generally good and the music choices reflected the station licence profiles so I felt the journey was progressing quite well. I then started to listen to the commercial breaks and then my until then pleasant journey started to unravel at a rate of miles...
This time of year suffers from a little known virus known as COI or to give it its fuller name the Central Office of Information. Every other advert on commercial radio is a important announcement from our state telling us how we should live our lives.
It was only because I was travelling such a long distance that I realised how much airtime is being bought and much frequency and thus inventory is being swallowed by this sort of clutter. The actual messages are hilarious with absolutely no Return on Investment or Respnse tools.
Firstly I was politely informed that if my child was to sneeze then I should strongly recommend he uses a tissue and not his hand as this will spread germs! The second advert which i heard no less than 10 times on my trip across 6 stations was a nauseating fly on the wall type radio advert about how Sam had moved in with her boyfriend and so far she was much happier. The advert then flipped to an announcer telling us if your circumstances change then let us know so we can re-calculate your tax credits - Tax credits are a 2 way street! I would love to know how many phone calls they are getting by little Sams wanting to fess up to receiving too much money.
There were more but you get the gist and they really do not deserve an airing in my blog.
Annoying yes, funny certainly but this volume of spend was more than a little diconcerting so I decided to do some research. Radio stations informed me that they are used to this seasonal glut of activity and it has been going on for years. One trade body informed me that the reason was that local goverment have annual budgets and this activity represents the remainder of their spends. If they dont spend it before their financial year end they will have their budgets cut for the following year. it seems it is a case of use it or lose it.
This I find truly abhorrent. We are all having tough times and if local government think wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds just to get the budget renewed for another year then they are wrong. At the very least they need to put real messages out there that are accountable and measurable. By taking this valuable inventory there is simply less airtime available for our struggling retailers to promote their wares and the airtime that remains is sold at a premium due to supply and demand.
I would love to see real spend levels for the COI by month to see if what I suspect is true and if there is anyone out there who can help then please do get in touch. Maybe I should run a radio campaign across all stations to try find the relevant information by advertising a really obscure help line number....
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