URN’s marketing took huge steps forward in 2010 and 2011, both on and off-air. We created a fantastic website, explored exciting new ways to brand ourselves on-air and developed a positive ethos that is integral to everything we do as a station. This year we have tried to consolidate the best of everything we’ve learnt over the past two years in order to create an exciting brand that’s full of energy and bursting with character.

On-air we have created an extensive new suite of idents which, for the first time, are entirely voiced by students and reflect the energy of our programming and the music we play. We have also experimented with new ways of integrating listeners’ voices into our imaging, putting our audience at the very heart of our on-air sound. We have continued to focus on the creative scripting that made our station sound so unique last year, building trails and promos that are brimming with personality and humour.

Our off-air mission has been simple: to ensure that no student on campus makes it through their first year without knowing about URN and what we stand for. To achieve this, we have focused on two key areas. Firstly, we have continued to use outside broadcasts as our main marketing tool, taking our brand and our programming right to our audience. Secondly, we’ve focused our marketing efforts on a series of extremely coordinated, creative campaigns that stand out from the crowd and resonate with students who are bombarded with endless marketing messages every day.

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Best Marketing & Station Sound

A new core imaging package

Two years ago, we decided to radically change our approach to station sound. It was time to ditch the commercial sound of our professional voiceover artists and replace them with real Nottingham students. Whilst these new student voices were used in trails and promos, the station’s core imaging (idents, branded beds, news themes etc.) was still branded with the old, commercial sounding professional voiceovers. This year, we created an entire core imaging package using solely student voices for the first time. This included new idents, a re-voiced news package and branded beds.

The package of 15 student-voiced idents was created from scratch, in-house [01:56, 04:50]. The old imaging sounded dated and dull, so the aim was to create a set of idents that sounded exciting, fresh and full of energy. We wanted not only to bring the genuine feel of student voices to the forefront of our on-air branding, but also give the station a fast paced, energetic feel that would reflect the type of music we play and grab the listener’s attention.

Listener voices at the heart of our on-air sound

In 2008 we introduced a new type of on-air branding to the station; we started mixing a simple three-note musical logo into the intros of songs. This year we wanted to refresh our branded tracks with a new, simple sound, both to keep the station sounding fresh, but also to make it easier for new audio producers to create imaging for the station. The result was a new, rhythmic ‘signature element’: the words University Radio Nottingham, each shouted by a different student voice, accompanied by sweeping FX that build on the word Nottingham.

We built this new signature sound into the start of our most popular playlist tracks [00:00] and soon incorporated it into station idents. Our new branded tracks are a great example of how we have combined the best of our branding output from both of the previous two years; we have taken the student focused sound from last year and combined it with the polished production from the year before. The new branded tracks ensure that our listeners have their voices heard right at the heart of our on-air sound and by recording plenty of student voices throughout the year we have been able to keep our branded tracks sounding fresh and diverse. University Radio Nottingham has become the ‘DNA’ for all of our on-air branding, reminding us that our listeners are the most important part of our programmes.

Throughout the year we invited students

down to the URN studios to record

our University Radio Nottingham clips

to keep our idents and branded tracks

sounding fresh.

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Best Marketing & Station Sound 2011/12

Back to basics – bringing URN to a new audience

As a station we’ve received a huge amount of recognition in the past few years for our programming output and marketing efforts. Whilst this is great for everyone involved in the station, it can sometimes be disastrous when it comes to our marketing strategy. It’s sometimes all too easy to assume that students know about URN and what we do. In the past we haven’t spent enough time covering the basics of the URN brand, and have tended to get hung up on complex ideas. To combat this we set ourselves the challenge of promoting the most basic core values of the station at various points throughout the year. We wanted to make sure that no student living on campus would make it through their first year without having a good idea of what URN is and what we stand for.

Hello!

At the start of the year we went back to basics and created a trail to introduce URN to new students arriving at the University [00:26]. This ran on most shows throughout the first few weeks of term and was played at live events to thousands of students during Week One. We made sure to avoid squeezing in all the ins and outs of our schedule, or berating listeners with a barrage of show names and timings. We didn’t include any contact details, any calls to action or even our web address. Instead, we wanted to pass on the simple message that URN exists and is all about entertainment, lively discussion and amazing music.

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Campus-wide poster campaign

We followed up our initial ‘back to basics’ on-air efforts with a campus wide poster campaign featuring a cloud of words that describe URN. We wanted to make students aware of the huge amount of content that we have to offer them and the wide range of things that are covered on the station. Again, the aim was not to draw listeners to a certain programme or online feature – we just wanted to promote the station in general.

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URN’s Listener Takeover

Another way in which we tried to raise awareness of the station was by giving listeners the chance to present their own half hour show as part of our Listener Takeover [03:49]. We promoted the event on campus and through social media, inviting students to get in touch if they wanted to present a show. We ended up with over twenty students involved on-air throughout the day, many of whom have decided to get involved with the station as a result. The motivations for the listener takeover were simple. Firstly, our studios are fairly hidden away on campus and we wanted to show students what actually goes on behind the scenes at the station. Secondly, we know from experience with our own presenters that a large proportion of our listeners find their way onto our website by links posted on Facebook and Twitter. We anticipated that our Takeover presenters would post about their shows online, and tell their own circles of friends to listen, instantly exposing URN to a huge audience over the entire day.

Left: All of our Listener Takeover shows are available online at urn1350.net/takeover.

Right: Listener Takeover poster.

Taking URN to our listeners

This year we have utilised outside broadcasts more than ever before as part of our off-air marketing. In the course of the year we’ve carried out twenty-nine live broadcasts from various different places on campus, and out in the wider student community in Nottingham. Organising and carrying out these live broadcasts has been a challenge both technically and logistically, but for us the benefits are obvious.

Our aim as a station is to be where our audience is. More and more this means making sure we’ve got a good presence online, but it also means bringing our programming, presenters and brand image right to the front doors of students in Nottingham. Our studios are hidden away in the basement of the main Students’ Union building, but outside broadcasts allow us to bring URN to the thousands of students living on campus who would never otherwise have known that we exist. The response to a live radio programme happening just outside a students’ bedroom window or an impromptu acoustic set happening outside the Physics building creates a far stronger impact than any poster or leaflet – and an outside broadcast doesn’t cost us a penny.

We were very careful to choose locations that would give us the maximum marketing potential. This meant visiting places that we hadn’t before, and targeting first year students who had no previous exposure to the station. Below are just a few examples of the key live broadcasts we carried out this year.

URN live from the Science Quad

As part of our Freshers’ Week coverage we spent a day broadcasting in the heart of the Faculty of Science area on campus. We know that the majority of students that get involved with URN take Arts degrees, and so we decided to target this untapped part of the University. We had staff from the Schools of Physics and Chemistry doing experiments live on-air, which not only sounded great, but also gave students a reason to come and see us in person.

The Pulse: Whose Lenton is it?

Throughout the year we realised that a lot of stories being covered

by our news team were all linked to relations between students and the City Council in the popular student

area of Lenton. We decided to host a special programme looking at these

issues, but instead of doing it in the studios we took the show to a

pub in the heart of Lenton so that students could not only come down

and share their opinions, but also see that URN’s news programming was

relevant to them.

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Creative campaigns - Marketing that stands out from the crowd

Our on-air marketing efforts last year were focused around unique, funny and cleverly scripted promos aimed squarely at students in Nottingham. They stand out from the crowd because they surprise our listeners and become pieces of entertainment in their own right - they’re not just thirty-five seconds of audio to fill between two songs.

This year we used exactly the same approach in our off-air marketing campaigns. Students are confronted with hundreds of pieces of marketing every single day, whether that’s a text from Domino’s pizza with a new offer or a flyer being thrust into their hand on their way to a lecture. Generic flyers and posters just don’t grab the attention of an audience that’s highly skilled at ignoring irrelevant promotion. To get through to students, we created campaigns that were based around imaginative ideas, with multiple elements, launched in a highly coordinated way for maximum impact. Our Students’ Union Elections campaign and our Hallward Fever project are the two best examples of this and proved extremely successful for the station.

Students’ Union Elections

For our coverage of this year’s Students’ Union Elections period, we created a huge Anchorman inspired campaign with campus-wide branding and highly coordinated online and on-air elements [02:52]. It all started when we realised that a lot of us at the station were obsessed with the film and we knew that Anchorman had a cult following amongst students. We have always covered SU Elections in a slightly tongue-in cheek way, because for the vast majority of students they make very little difference to their everyday lives, but provide a honeypot of gossip and exam procrastination material. The 70s newsroom theme fitted this angle perfectly.

We raided the student theatre for some vintage suits and dresses and organised a photo-shoot with presenters from our key SU Elections programmes. We then created a mass of marketing materials that were used across campus and online, the pinnacle of which was a five-metre banner that was hung in the heart of the main Students’ Union building.

The point of the campaign was to capture the attention of students, using humour and an instantly recognisable style. We had to give them a reason to switch off their ‘marketing blinkers’ and stop to look at our branding. It got students talking purely because it was a ‘cool thing’ on campus, and we soon saw our images spreading across Facebook as people shared them with their friends.

URN’s Hall Tour

In the last two weeks of term, students living in halls on campus are left with no exams, no lectures and essentially nothing to do. They’ll generally wake up late, lounge around in the sunshine and listen to music with their friends. We saw this as an ideal marketing opportunity and a chance to reach out to thousands of first year students before they moved off campus into rented houses. We decided to do a series of outside broadcast events from 12–5pm at various halls of residence over five days. We set up in the most visible places, playing out music to the students who were gathered outside. We took requests and got them involved in on-air games, ensuring that it wasn’t a Spotify playlist that they were listening to but their very own radio station instead.

Top right: Advertising on plasma screens in all halls of residence and across campus. Middle right: Our banner opposite the SU reception. Middle left: The

SU Elections mini-site. Lower right: A3 SU Elections poster.

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Hallward Fever

With no lectures to go to for weeks on end, students inevitably spend their university revision periods chained to their laptops in the infamous Hallward Library – a building known for its faulty air conditioning, lack of space to work and a higher than average procrastination toll. With their laptops already open and headphones plugged in, we wanted to target these students and get them listening to URN.

We created a fictional disease called Hallward Fever and marketed URN as the only known cure. We created posters that were spread across the entire campus and concentrated in areas where we knew students would be revising. We created Hallward Emergency Survival Kits using printed carrier bags and filled them with revision essentials: Red Bull (five hundred cans of which we secured for free by involving Red Bull in the promotion), pens (which were given to us through a collaboration with the University’s student-run counselling service), Haribo sweets and a leaflet promoting URN’s ability to tackle revision-related woes. We handed five hundred of these survival kits out at the entrance of the Hallward Library during the exam period.

Crucially, none of the printed or online material that we designed was based around URN’s regular brand image. We avoided using our logo and instead developed a separate theme for the campaign to lure students into thinking this was something new, something they hadn’t interacted with before.

Central to the campaign was our online Hallward Fever Diagnosis Tool at hallwardfever.com. This spoof website asked students to select their symptoms and then informed them of the severity of their condition before prescribing a healthy dose of URN (every time!). We integrated the tool with a Facebook app, allowing students to share their diagnosis with friends. This was incredibly successful, and our initial coordinated launch soon became a viral, self-sustaining campaign throughout the May exam period.

Using online content to drive listeners to our programmes

More than ever before, students are tuning in having first watched or listened to another piece of content that we’ve made available online. This type of supplementary content had been limited up until this year, and so we worked on two online-only tactics to drive more listeners to our regular programmes: on-demand audio clips, and videos.

Bottom left to top right: Our online ‘diagnosis tool’ at hallwardfever.com. We give out Hallward Survival Kits at the library. The A6 flyer that was included in the bags. A diagnosis shared by a student using our Facebook app. Support from the University on Twitter. A3 Poster.

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The Audio Stream

A big new addition to our main event mini-sites (Week One, Students’ Union Elections, Elections Night Live and Summer Party) was a new way to access on-demand audio clips that we’ve called the Audio Stream. We don’t currently have the rights, or the budget to create an entire ‘listen back’ service. However, we do know that students don’t have the time to listen back to entire programmes and hunt down the most relevant bits. They want bite-sized chunks of accessible audio that they can listen to and share with their friends. The Audio Stream does exactly that.

The design and format of the Audio Stream has evolved throughout the year and has been adapted to suit each specific event. In our initial experiment with it in Week One, it was simply a list of audio clips. But for the Summer Party festival at the end of the year, we built an interactive map of geo-tagged audio clips from the site, which enables listeners to explore our content in the context in which it was recorded. Clicking on the backstage area, for example, gives you access to all of our artist interviews.

Videos

Students spend a lot of time on YouTube, and we have really taken advantage of this by creating a series of supplementary videos that drive listeners back to our website. During the Students’ Union Elections period, we created spoof campaign videos for two of our presenters, which were watched by over 3,500 people. Our Science Show also created regular Student Science videos throughout the year looking at wacky experiments and real science being carried out at the University. One of their videos, The Vortex Cannon, went viral over the course of a few weeks and achieved over 825,000 views. This drove a huge amount of traffic to our website and showcased our programmes on a global scale.

This year our marketing and station sound has built on the best of our previous efforts and has evolved based on our ever-growing understanding of our audience – students at the University of Nottingham.

• On-air we have combining student-focused content with polished production to create a genuine sound that is bursting with energy.

• We have forced ourselves to take an unassuming stance with marketing that goes back to basics, promoting URN’s core values.

• We have taken our programmes and our brand image out of the studios and into key locations on campus with more outside broadcasts than ever before.

• We have have experimented with bold new creative campaigns that grab the attention of students and stand out from the crowd.

Radioplayer

At the start of the year we created our very own Radioplayer console, becoming part of the nationwide network of stations using the same web player on their sites. This wasn’t just a huge technical achievement, but crucially made our station and our programmes searchable as part of the Radioplayer database, which is accessible from every other Radioplayer console on the web. This has increased the chances that new listeners will discover URN, either by searching, or by switching directly from another station’s player.

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Left: The Week One Audio Stream.Right: The SU Elections Audio Stream.Below: The Summer Party Audio Stream.