Radio is the masses’ first choice, has 93% media reach, reveal the brains behind Talk 100.3 FunAsia

UAE has over 40 radio channels across Arabic, Hindi, English, Malayalam, Tamil, Tagalog, and Farsi. What FunAsia set out to do was to cater to a large, diverse audience, whether it is sports or business, and outperform every other channel in the arena. Today, they can confidently say they’ve created a niche where their content caters to the mature South Asian audience.

Podcasts are steadily rising in popularity and are bound to have affected the space. They’re not too worried though. Podcasts are audio-recorded content in the digital medium, while the radio is frequency FM. They are not competing against each other. Radio is live, while podcasts are recorded content for the digital domain. As Sunny puts it, “What we have done is created room for podcasts to be aired, thus aiding collaboration. We have podcast partners who have come on board and curate content for that domain and get featured on the channel.”

The other thing to place your bets on, as Dheeraj puts it, is TTL or Through-The-Line marketing, the new age medium web. “When doing a station campaign, you get brands to sponsor the program and get their radio presenters to come to the stores for an outdoor activation, so that listeners who are tuned in not only get a chance to win at the event but also get to be a part of the radio show. It then goes on the digital and social media platforms.” Today, the medium is so blended that they are working on customizing and creating bite-size podcast versions for the radio domain. Thus, radio no longer works in a silo; it is backed by other mediums as well.