"Great strategic planning and a healthy appetite for calculated risk has seen East Coast Radio deliver one of the most robust multimedia marketing platforms in South Africa, giving brand owners and media planners an entirely new perspective on media planning for maximum results in the core broadcast space," explains Trish Taylor, CEO of East Coast Radio.
There simply is no such thing as traditional or regional media anymore - the blurring of the lines between online and offline, the integration of media technologies and the reach of the web has created an entirely new media environment that is no longer constrained by technology or geographic footprints.
"At East Coast Radio our approach has been to aggressively integrate new technologies as a feature of our overall business model and we have been doing this for some years now with great success, benefitting from the key learnings along the way. Traditional mass media is increasingly competing with new digital media channels and the fact remains that technology and the propensity for consumers to use it are not going to go away," explains Trish.
"Rather than fight it, we invested our energies into finding ways to develop sustainable and mutually beneficial platforms for radio and multimedia technology to integrate and grow revenue streams. In many respects East Coast Radio has set the trend in the sector, introducing our listeners to these new platforms and making it a part of their everyday lives. We have conditioned our market towards blogging for the last three years while other stations are only starting with this now. Twitter is the current big social media craze and our jocks are already tweeting and engaging with their listeners."
East Coast Radio has been very successful in using its website as an additional advertising channel and promotional tool whereas many radio owners still only engage their website as an online brochure about the station and its line-up. As a result, the radio station has enjoyed a major growth curve in terms of its online advertiser base due to its impressive online audience numbers, as well as the amount of creativity that has been infused in this digital space. "Growing online audiences is a central strategy of ours and we do this through a number of strategies and tactics from providing various blogging environments, exclusive podcasts, contesting and a rich resource of news, sport and entertainment information that is not available on-air," explains Trish.
