1. Financial Considerations
There are various financial considerations to think of during the production of a radio advertisement.
The costs can be high due to the various things that are involved in the process. Firstly, the company
who want the advert must pay a production company to create it for them (if they do not create it
in-house). This will mean paying them a certain amount of money, depending on the amount of
production stages you wish for them to complete. The radio station could pay the indiv iduals by the
hour or a bulk amount to the production company. The company will also have to pay for external
things such as voice actors. An independent production company may also be required to purchase a
song or sound effect for legal purposes.
If the radio company has its own radio advert recording facility, it will not have to spend money
hiring people, as current employees of the radio station can take over some of the roles. It may
already have its own equipment, though if it is just starting off, this will be costly. Microphones can
be anything from £100-£500, depending on the type you want and the quality of it. To make a room
sound-proof and kit it out for recording can cost several thousand pounds. Software can be
purchased on a yearly basis and can cost around £100 for a good piece of software such as Reaper.
How much the advert costs to be broadcast will be based upon the type of radio station it is to be
put on. If the radio station is small and doesn’t attract a huge amount of listeners, then the cost will
be low. However, if the advert is to be put on a national station, it is likely to cost much more.
The following is a rate card for Key103, which has an approximate weekly listening audience of
733,000. The cost of a week of advertising (the schedule of which is shown below) is £2910 + VAT.
The adverts will usually be around 30 seconds long, in order to allow approximately 7-8 adverts in a
small amount of time. A company may request more allocated times for their adverts, depending on
the type of campaign they are running. They may want a high intensity campaign to try and make as
many people aware as possible, or for the advert only to be played at certain times. Some factors
that may affect this include health and awareness advertising campaigns, seasonal adverts and
others. Requesting different times may increase the cost of the campaign or lessen it, depending on
the requests.
