“We’re Still Number One… AND WE WANT TO SHOUT ABOUT IT!”

“RAJAR Day?  That’s come round quickly”.  I wonder how many people in your office have said that today?

One of the first promos I made when I started out in radio back in the 90s was a RAJAR results trail. We’d gone up and the boss at the time wanted to shout about it, on the hour, every hour.

For those that don’t know what RAJAR is, check out my Radio Terms blog

The script read something like this :

30″ SCRIPT READ

V/o : “The audience figures are out – and we’ve got something to shout about”.

Clips of presenters and music

“… More listeners than ever before… Station FM”

Excuse the script, I was young and inexperienced.

RAJAR trails ARE fun to make. Nice and upbeat, shouty and self-congratulatory, but do listeners actually care that the station they’re listening to is number one? They listen to your station because they like it – and will probably not change their opinion based on hearing a RAJAR trail.

It’s very hard to gauge listener responses to promos, but I struggle to believe that listeners gain anything from RAJAR trails (I could be wrong – it’s just my opinion). In these days of heavy ad-loads and lots of clutter aren’t you wasting valuable time when you could be positioning your station or building key perceptions?

I’ve got to say though, that there is one RAJAR trail which I love (purely on a radio-geek level).  It was a Viking FM promo which ran around 10 years ago. From what I can remember it was a roll-call of competitior stations followed by an apology from Viking FM for beating them in the ratings.

So what do you think? Are RAJAR trails a waste of time? Vote and leave your comments below.

And if you’ve done well in your RAJAR, well done – I know what a great feeling it is. If you’ve not done so well, remember that these figures…