The Milward Brown study with the RAB in 2000 showed the effect on ad awareness when 10% of a TV budget was invested in radio advertising. The overall effect was an increase of 15% in awareness. At the time, radio was also seen to be vastly cost effective and can add reach at different times of the day to TV. The overall combination of radio and TV is very complementary and with the cross over of sonic branding can be even more effective. Using Virgin radio for a test, radio listeners could describe a TV commercial from just the sonic branding alone.

29.8m people have access to the internet with broadband penetration expected to reach 60% of all UK households by the end of 2009. In a survey by the RAB, over 70% of Broadband users listen to the radio whilst online. This figure is only just lower for regular internet users. Half of these people do this every week. The RAB also discovered that 59% of people have checked out things on the internet after hearing them on the radio, while 62% said that the radio acted as reminder to look up more info online.

Radio and online offer both an emotional and functional role. Emotionally you can connect to social sites or on radio a community of listeners, while functionally they provide an easy access to information. It was also proved by the RAB that using radio creative with key words that can be typed into search engines allowed campaigns to reach their full potential.

Like radio and TV, combined with press, radio can provide brands with a connection point to consumers on an emotional level unobtainable by other media. It is seen as a friend while press is seen as informative and functional. Both are geographically flexible and can be used to target particularly small areas or stand alone regions. Radio can also help negate the high ad avoiding rate in press. 68% of people avoid ads in the national press while only 16% are ad avoiders in radio. They are also up to date mediums and provide news and messaging in a time relevant method.

Radio used in conjunction with outdoor is a powerful method of creating brand awareness due to their complimentary nature. While radio is a time specific medium using voices to set the tone, outdoor is location specific, using location to familiarise consumers with products on a high status, public level. Both mediums are also high frequency while having low ad-avoidance.

Unlike other mediums they can be geographically flexible to regional and local targeting and can be run simultaneously on both mediums. The RAB and the OOA conducted a study to identify the effects of radio used in conjunction with outdoor. It showed that people associated a brand's sonic logos with the visual aspect and combining the two across two mediums.

The two mediums are also used to target people at key drivetimes. Outdoor locations near roadsides combined with heavy peak drivetime airtime have proved to be extremely successful particularly with car and motoring brands. It is also highly effective at reaching consumers during the retail day. It can remind to purchase near the point of sale coupled with an on air campaign.

John Walker

Head of Radio, OMD UK

Radio as we know is based on gaining awareness of brands via sound to the ears. TV as a form of media also brings sound to the ears. And if people are unfortunate to be blind, then sound is the most important sense to that target audience.

As we know magazines, newspapers do not create sound, but whos to say that a radio transcript shall never appear in a section in either of those media. I mean there could be a section in the radio times with written transcripts of radio ads, and details on the timings to be aired.

You can get birthday cards, with an internal music system, with a song or tune played when you open the card. Can you guess that Sales Promotion could be equal. You deliver a two-fold leaflet through the door of someones home outlining a local event. As the reciever opens out the two-fold leaflet,  the brands latest radio ad plays. How cool would this mean. I like talking about inventions. This could be an expensive option, however, nothing can be as expensive as radio advertising, but to have radio ads in sales promotion could become a combined media.

Never forget In-store POS displays, since the digital innovations appearing, customers of retailers can interact to discover the information they are looking for. Then again, a pattern could appear, like you get on your computer screensaver when on hold, and then all of a sudden the customer hears a radio ad being played. E.g. the latest Tesco ad if shopping in Tesco. Or the latest Boots radio ad, if a custom to Boots and looking at a POS points digital POS screen.

Hope this answer of imagination helps your enquiry.