By Steve Faguy
Kiss. Boom. Jack. Fresh. Jewel. Virgin. Country. Real Country. Pure Country. Hit Country. K-Rock. B. Q. O. X. Mix. Moose. Drive. Énergie. Rythme. Rouge. Plaisir.
They’re all brands used by Canada’s largest broadcasting companies for multiple radio stations in their groups. Some are generic enough they’re even used by multiple stations of different companies.
But these days, rather than some common brands being coincidental, they’re being planned. Bit by bit, national brands are replacing what had been individual stations’ identities. In January, Bell Media turned 10 of its adult contemporary stations, including heritage brands like Majic 100 in Ottawa (established in 1991), C100 in Halifax (which goes back to 1977), and QM FM in Vancouver (which launched in 1960), into Move Radio, following a similar rebrand of its country stations as Pure Country in 2019. In February, Stingray Radio rebranded three stations in Atlantic Canada as Rewind.
In both announcements, the companies stressed the stations would retain local personalities, particularly their local morning shows. And it’s true. But these brands also have a lot of shared programming (some of which predates the brand change).
The Rewind stations, which also include 103.9 in Sudbury, Ont., have a common midday show hosted by Lea Miller and evening show hosted by Matt Storey, and their music playlists are virtually identical. The Move stations have midday shows hosted by Ashley Greco out of Toronto, and Move Radio’s Exclusive At40 with Ryan Seacrest in the evenings, and their music playlists are the also the same songs in the same order, with the occasional one changed here and there depending on the market.
While it might seem as though the goal of these common brands is to make it easier to repurpose content across stations and save money by cutting local staff, radio executives interviewed by Cartt.ca give a more nuanced picture of what’s going on.
Steve Jones, senior vice-president of radio at Stingray, says the main advantage to the common brands is “more on the imaging side” — the station IDs, jingles and other elements that give a radio station its on-air feel.
“We were able to use the same level of imaging production and quality of sound in those markets at almost no cost to those markets, which is I think that’s pretty sensible use of resources.” – Steve Jones, Stingray
“Our flagship Boom station is in Toronto,” Jones says. “And we invest very heavily in imaging writers and imaging producers, and it’s kind of a content producing machine in Toronto because you’re serving the number-one market in the country, but we also have Boom radio stations in some of the smallest markets in Canada. We were able to use the same level of imaging production and quality of sound in those markets at almost no cost to those markets, which is I think that’s pretty sensible use of resources.”
Troy Reeb, executive vice president broadcast networks at Corus Entertainment, sees things much the same way.
“There’s a lot of effort, not just at Corus but across all players big and small, to get more bang out of content investments and use them in more locations and on more stations,” Reeb says. “But both Global News Radio and (hot AC brand) Fresh are more brand plays than they are centralization plays.”
With Global News Radio, Corus grafted “a strong, recognized news brand that means something coast to coast” onto the brands of its talk stations in seven markets. Reeb says the move was to “allow those who were already strong to have an extra sheen to be put on their information programming and allow those who were more in a challenging position to benefit from the brand recognition and value that comes with being part of Global News.”
And while there was some new national programming, including Charles Adler Tonight and the overnight show The Shift, “neither of those supplanted any local programming.” Instead, there was less foreign syndicated programming.
“You’re getting brand efficiency more than you’re getting talent and programming efficiency,” Reeb says.
National brands aren’t that new. Bell’s Virgin Radio brand has been in Canada since 2008. CHUM started sports network The Team in 2001 (which became TSN Radio starting in 2011). Quebec’s Énergie network goes back to 1986. Earlier examples include the ill-fated CKO radio network of the 1970s and 80s.
But Kevin Desjardins, president of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, acknowledges there has been a trend toward more national brands. “It’s just an opportunity for operators to figure out what works and to apply it across a number of different markets, even smaller and independent ones,” he says. “I think comes back to not needing to reinvent the wheel.”
Among those wheels: marketing. With a common national brand, you can create one TV ad and run it on multiple TV stations or TV or web channels (and if you’re Bell Media or Corus, those are channels you probably own, too).
“There’s a lot of logic to that when you have national TV networks where you can run generic Move Radio advertising,” Jones says.
Bell Media executives were not available to comment about branding changes, as they’re still dealing with the fallout of this winter’s mass layoffs.
Even with the national brand, Desjardins says radio stations can still stay connected to their local audience. “Being based in Ottawa, I see something like Move that still has a very Ottawa feel to it. So I don’t think that you lose the local character while using national branding on some of these things.”
In some markets, though, brands are ingrained into that local feel, and replacing a heritage brand with a national one can be a mistake. “There are a ton of really strong brands that you just wouldn’t want to lose,” says Jones. “I mean if Bell abandoned CHOM in Montreal and then I want to start a rock station in Montreal. I’m going to call it CHOM.”
In some cases, broadcasters have taken a brand that has strong value in one market and copied it in others — Stingray did just that with Hot 89.9 in Ottawa, copying the brand onto stations in Sudbury, Charlottetown, Bonnyville, Alta., and Wainwright, Alta.
“When we have a heritage brand that works really well in a large market where there’s a lot of revenue at stake, we would look to expand that brand regionally or nationally versus rebrand the heritage brand to something kind of random,” Jones explains. “There are cases where we have rebranded heritage radio stations where it just made logical sense, but for the most part we’d rather work out from where the heritage exists.”
The Jim Pattison Broadcast Group did the same with its Beach brand in Kelowna, exporting it to a place you might not associate much with beaches at first glance: northern Saskatchewan. “That was our Saskatchewan team that made the decision” to rebrand stations in Melfort and Prince Albert, Pattison president Rod Schween tells Cartt.ca.
“Northern Saskatchewan has a ton of lakes and as a matter of fact is hard to do business in Northern Saskatchewan in summertime because all those folks are gone to their little lakefront properties and spending time at the lake in the summer.”
For an extreme example of what integrating programming with a common brand might look like, you can take the MyFM stations in southern Ontario, though its owner stresses their situation is different.
“Where it’s really different in my view is a lot of what they’re doing is about cost-cutting.” – John Pole, MyFM
After the launch of another national brand, “I will get people that will comment to me… Oh yeah MyFM has been doing that for years, it’s about time they figured that out,” says Jon Pole, president and owner of My Broadcasting Corp. “I understand that’s meant as a compliment, but it’s really not, because when I look at what the big guys are doing compared to what we’re doing, it’s similar, yes, but it’s not the same. And where it’s really different in my view is a lot of what they’re doing is about cost-cutting.”
The 12 MyFM stations have shared announcers and a shared playlist, but each has its own local news, which also feeds MBC’s local news websites (such as St. Thomas Today). Once or twice an hour, a short time block is reserved for local information, voice-tracked by an announcer. Pole said that setup allows his stations to efficiently run in tiny markets and serve the audience with what it universally says is its top need: local news.
“If you live in that market, that stuff actually matters,” he says. “So that’s the secret sauce. It’s local news and information.”
By centralizing everything else about their operations, Pole says MyFM can focus human resources on newsgathering. The listeners don’t really care about the brand name. Which is good because a lot of radio brand names sound pretty generic. There’s a reason for that.
“Up until recently, a lot of ratings systems we operated in were ‘unaided recall’,” says Pattison’s Schween. “So, can you come up with a brand that people are going to remember and they’re going to write down when they fill out a diary?”
And once that brand recognition has been established, it can be hard to shake off. Schween says when he travels to southeast B.C. and meets people there, “they’ll say ‘hey it’s Rod from EK Radio.’ We haven’t been EK Radio in 19 years, but that’s still the brand they remember.”
Stingray’s Jones agrees radio brands sound similar. But, he adds, “don’t all car brands sound the same?” Still, he thinks there could be a bit more creativity in branding, using coffee as an example.
“If you were to start a chain of coffee shops, and you had to choose between the name Starbucks and Second Cup, I mean who wouldn’t choose Second Cup? Starbucks is a ridiculous name. You’re going to name a coffee shop after the mermaid in Moby Dick? It’s stupid. But smart brands create a name that captures an aura and they attach more images around that aura and they build something bigger, and I think that’s a lot more enticing than just calling it what it is.
“Calling it ‘country’ or calling it ‘rock’ is a great descriptor, but it’s really not very emotionally engaging and, I don’t know, I’d like to see us as an industry think a little bigger, a little differently.”
