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GCAP MEDIA: ONE PREVIOUS
OWNER, NEEDS SERIOUS
ATTENTION
GRANT GODDARD
8 April 2008
ExecutiveSummary
The Board of GCap Media, the UK’s largest commercial radio group, is
recommending to its shareholders that they accept an acquisition offer of
£375 million by Global Radio, the UK’s third largest commercial radio group.
The recommendation, announced on 31st March 2008, brings to a close a 15-
week period during which Global tabled three consecutive offers for GCap,
culminating in the final price of 225 pence. This represents a substantial
premium over the stock’s all-time low of 120.5 pence reached on Christmas
Eve 2007. It effectively brings to a close the company’s tortured three-year
existence, during which its market capitalisation plummeted from £711 million
at the time of its creation in 2005 (from the merger of GWR Group and Capital
Radio Group) to a low of £200 million at the end of 2007. If shareholders
accept, there will be regulatory review by Ofcom and the Office of Fair
Trading, with possible referral to the Competition Commission.
By combining GCap with its existing radio portfolio acquired in 2007 from
Chrysalis, Global Radio will control 41% of UK commercial radio listening, the
first time that such a significant proportion of the sector has belonged to a
single owner. Additionally, GCap currently holds the contract for the sale of
national advertising on Guardian Media Group’s radio stations, which account
for 11% of commercial radio listening. Competition issues could be raised in
some local radio markets, particularly in the Midlands/Birmingham and
London, where GCap/Global’s share is considerably higher than its 41%
national average. Divestment of stations might ultimately prove necessary,
although Ofcom will argue to the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition
Commission that the commercial radio advertising landscape has changed
significantly since the last acquisition of this scale was considered in 2005,
potentially reducing regulatory hurdles to consolidation.
Global has stated that the acquisition of GCap will “allow it to extract
significant operational benefits, pursue growth opportunities and focus on
increasing the quality of its offering for its employees, advertisers and
listeners”.1 Our opinion is that such a balanced approach will be essential to
the enlarged group’s future success. Whilst there will undoubtedly be
opportunities to remove costs duplicated across both groups, it will also prove
necessary to divert significant amounts to the production of content with
renewed appeal for audiences, and to the marketing of stations, both activities
that GCap tragically neglected. In this way, GCap/Global will hopefully be able
to compete more effectively with the BBC which, as Global notes, “today
dominates the UK radio landscape”.2
If the acquisition of GCap by Global is approved by shareholders, then 87% of
UK commercial radio listening will be in the hands of privately held
companies. This is a significant change from even a year ago, when 80% of
commercial radio listening was controlled by publicly quoted companies. The
hope is that the sector’s newly acquired cloak of privacy from the City will
encourage players to focus more carefully on long-term objectives rather than
on short-term achievements, a phenomenon which has dogged much of its
performance during the last decade.
'GCap Media: One Previous Owner, Needs Serious Attention' by Grant Goddard
Introduction
The culmination of Global Radio’s 15-week campaign to take control of GCap
Media has ended with the GCap Board’s acceptance of its third offer made on
4th March 2008 at 225 pence per share, an 86% premium over the prevailing
price (121 pence) prior to the press leak of Global’s initial offer in early
January 2008. The revenue multiple achieved by the sale (1.9x) is lower than
last year’s acquisitions of Emap Radio and Chrysalis Radio, reflecting GCap’s
lower operating margins and the poor performances of many of its brands.
Because of Global’s need to create ‘scale’ for its existing business, the actual
price paid by Global is more likely to reflect its needs, rather than any explicit
value placed upon GCap’s individual assets.
Table 1
Recent commercial radio group acquisitions
[Source: Enders Analysis]
On 7th December 2007, it became inevitable that GCap would be acquired by
Global, and sooner rather than later. On that date, Emap announced it would
sell its radio and magazine businesses to German publisher H. Bauer for
£1.14 billion, a deal that proved immensely disappointing for Global Radio
which had expected to acquire Emap Radio. Global was very frustrated that
its own bid for Emap Radio had been so close to the (somewhat notional)
price of £422 million that Emap accepted from Bauer (though Emap’s decision
may have been partly driven by its desire to divest radio without regulatory
strings attached, making a German company with no existing UK radio
holdings an ideal buyer). Now, the only other substantial radio business
publicly available for Global to acquire was GCap and so, with its failed £420
million offer for Emap Radio burning a hole in its pocket, it proved imperative
for Global to mount a bid for GCap.
For Global, the difference between acquiring Emap and GCap is that the
former was an efficiently run business with a healthy mix of old and new
brands, whereas the GCap portfolio is dominated by old brands that, with the
exception of Classic FM, appear to be in terminal decline with listeners. For
Global, Emap had represented an almost ideal merger with myriad
opportunities to integrate its key brands (Global’s Galaxy with Emap’s Kiss for
the youth demographic; Global’s Heart and Emap’s Magic for the older
demographic). GCap, on the other hand, comprises a mixed bag of radio
stations that have developed piecemeal from successive waves of acquisition
since the 1980s, rather than from a joined-up strategy for a radio group. As a
result, Global is acquiring GCap as a ‘fixer-upper’ that is almost three times its
own size and which has a recent track record so poor that the challenge of
turning it around would prove daunting for any buyer (see GCap Media – the
end of the road [2008-01e]).
MarketPower
Global suddenly becomes the largest player in the commercial radio business,
commanding 41% of commercial radio listening, and having risen from
nowhere within the last year. It was only in June 2007 that Global Radio was
created to acquire Chrysalis Radio for £170 million in a transaction that was
part of Chrysalis co-founder Chris Wright’s long-term strategy to cash out of
the music businesses he had built since 1967. Global not only acquired the
Chrysalis stations (accounting for 11% of commercial radio listening) but also
Chrysalis’ existing contract to sell national advertising for Guardian Media
Group’s radio stations (a further 11% share). However, in October 2007,
Global lost the GMG contract (to GCap) and was left with a radio sales
department working at half capacity. It desperately needed greater scale in a
medium that depends heavily upon the ability to deliver many millions of
listeners to advertisers, and it was GCap alone which offered that opportunity.
Table 2
Commercial radio broadcasters ranked by listening
[Source: Enders Analysis based on RAJAR Q4 2007]
The landscape of commercial radio ownership has changed dramatically
during the last year. At the beginning of 2007, 80% of commercial radio
listening was in the hands of publicly quoted companies. Following Bauer’s
acquisition of Emap Radio, and Global’s purchases of Chrysalis and GCap,
87% of commercial radio listening will now be in private hands. This returns
the commercial radio sector broadly to how it was in 1987, prior to the then
largest group Capital Radio’s listing on the London Stock Exchange, an
innovation followed by many of its competitors. In the 1990s, commercial radio
became the darling of the City, culminating in Capital Radio’s share price
reaching the dizzy heights of £19.38 in 2000, but the sector fell massively
from grace thereafter. Public ownership suited the industry well while it was
riding the crest of a successful expansionist period. However, the bubble burst
when commercial radio was shown not to have an effective competitive
strategy against a resurgent BBC radio. Since then, commercial radio’s
audiences, revenues and stock prices have fallen sharply.
Commercial radio’s hope is that its newly restored cloak of privacy will permit
management the time and space to focus on longer-term issues that the day-
to-day scrutiny of the stock market did not allow. For Global, the task of
turning around GCap is likely to take several years and will require significant
investment in research and marketing in order to create innovative content
with mass appeal. Global Chairman Charles Allen is often characterised as a
‘slash and burn’ consolidator, much as Ralph Bernard had been when Chief
Executive of GCap and its predecessor GWR Group, until his departure in
December 2007. Although there will inevitably be duplicated costs across the
two entities that can be stripped out, Global will have to restore direction to
some of GCap’s brands that have had much of the life sucked out of them in
recent years. Whereas the post-Allen ITV has become a largely homogenous
national network with a lower cost base, it is our opinion that GCap’s local
brands would benefit from a greater focus on local content that would truly
differentiate them from the BBC’s successful national networks.
Although the combined GCap/Global operation will have a 41% share of
commercial radio listening averaged across the whole UK, its market
concentrations will be markedly higher in some local areas, potentially raising
competition issues. In London, GCap/Global will own five FM local stations
and two AM local stations (plus national Classic FM), commanding 48% of
commercial radio listening, whereas its nearest rival Bauer Radio owns only
two FM stations in the market. In Birmingham, GCap/Global will own three FM
stations and one AM station, and listening overlaps with neighbouring GCap
local stations push the group’s share beyond 60%.
Table 3
Share of commercial radio listening in GCap/Global Radio local markets
[Source: RAJAR Q4 2007]
Whether station disposals will be required on competition grounds in London
and Birmingham is unclear as yet, because the regulatory landscape has
changed significantly since the last radio transactions of this scale took place
in 2005, which concerned Emap’s acquisition of Scottish Radio Holdings and
the GWR/Capital Radio Group merger. Ofcom published a lengthy research
report in 2006 on the radio advertising market whose conclusions, it said,
“could potentially smooth the way for more consolidation under competition
rules, in particular insofar as it relates to large metropolitan markets” (see UK
Commercial Radio Consolidation [2007-88]).3 Ofcom’s argument that radio
advertising is part of a wider media advertising market, both at the local and
national levels, has yet to be offered in evidence to the Office of Fair Trading
or the Competition Commission, making it difficult to know whether either will
be convinced that commercial radio local market concentrations are no longer
such a critical metric of competition.
Future Strategies
Global now has to consider some of the same pressing issues that GCap
Chief Executive Fru Hazlitt had tackled in the ‘defence strategy’ she unveiled
on 11th February 2008. These include:
• GCap’s shareholding in the national commercial radio DAB multiplex
(Digital One) which Hazlitt intended to divest
• GCap’s digital-only radio stations which Hazlitt intended to close (TheJazz
has already closed, though Planet Rock has been reprieved)
• GCap’s Xfm stations which Hazlitt planned to sell (or close)
• GCap’s investments in 24 local DAB multiplexes
• The poor performances of GCap’s The One and Gold networks
• Ofcom’s re-advertisement of the Classic FM national FM licence in 2010
as a sealed bid auction.
GCap/Global’s future strategy for DAB, in particular, will inevitably impact the
whole radio industry (both BBC and commercial) because of the scale of
GCap’s investments in all aspects of its vertically integrated DAB radio
business (transmission, platform, content and advertising sales). Although the
Department for Culture Media & Sport’s Digital Radio Working Party will not
publish its final report until year-end 2008, its Chairman Barry Cox admitted
that “some of our questions may get answered for us before we have finished
[our deliberations]”.4 For example, Global might decide to retain GCap’s
majority shareholding in the national DAB multiplex in order to lease excess
capacity to Channel Four for its digital radio aspirations. This could prove an
effective way to suck ‘new money’ into the presently impoverished commercial
radio DAB eco-structure.
Global Chairman Charles Allen insists rightly that GCap’s “brands and assets
are highly complementary to those of the Global Radio Group”.5 Press
speculation has centred on Global replacing some of GCap’s The One
Network stations with its own Heart brand, although the audiences for the two
services do not create a perfect fit because listeners to The One Network are
generally younger and more downmarket than those of Heart. Elsewhere,
despite GCap’s Xfm and Global’s Galaxy brands sharing very similar
audience demographics, their music formats (which are embedded in their
Ofcom licences) are distinct and complementary. Young people will probably
tend to listen to either Xfm’s modern rock/indie music or Galaxy’s dance
music, but not both, making it difficult to combine these networks into one.
Table 4
GCap and Global Radio network audiences
[Source: Enders Analysis based on RAJAR Q4 2007]
Although consolidation offers owners a tempting opportunity to re-brand local
radio stations, such actions in the past have often produced unwelcome
consequences. GCap’s re-branding of Xfm Scotland, Emap’s re-branding of
its Magic network, GMG’s re-branding of London’s Smooth FM, and The Local
Radio Company’s re-branding of its stations have all demonstrated how
fraught with danger it can be to tamper with a station’s name, image or music
format. As one newspaper leader recently pointed out to Global, “people have
a very different relationship with their favourite radio brands than they do with
television” so that “changing the name of some [GCap] local or regional radio
stations would probably be met with resistance in some cities”.6 GCap has
already standardised the logos and the on-air sound of its One Network local
stations during the last year, with little result so far.
At the heart of Global’s plans for GCap will be former Capital Radio Group
Programme Director Richard Park, who was appointed Global Radio’s
Executive Director immediately after it acquired Chrysalis. Whereas Global
Chairman Allen will be looking to cut costs in the newly merged group, Park
will need to command sufficient resources to create compelling content that
can tempt listeners back to commercial radio. Compared to television,
successful radio content is relatively cheap to produce. More so than money,
winning radio programming requires creativity, determination and risk-taking,
something that Park excelled at in the 1990s at Capital. The question is – will
Park’s skills still be as relevant today to the current radio infrastructure, and
will Park be able to pull off the resurrection of GCap that others have failed to
do since he quit Capital in 2001 to become Headmaster of TV’s Fame
Academy? The future shape of the entire commercial radio industry, not just
GCap/Global, will very much hinge upon the successful execution of Park’s
turnaround strategy in the next five years.
[First published by Enders Analysis as report 2008-32.]
© 2008 Grant Goddard
Published by Radio Books
http://www.radiobooks.org
http://www.grantgoddard.co.uk
1 Global Radio Group Limited. Offer For GCap Media plc, 31 March 2008.
2 Global Radio Group Limited. Offer For GCap Media plc, 31 March 2008.
3 Ofcom. Review of Media Ownership Rules, 14 November 2006, p.64.
4 Department for Culture, Media & Sport. Stakeholders Seminar, 10 March 2008.
5 Global Radio Group Limited. Offer For GCap Media plc, 31 March 2008.
6 Amanda Andrews. ‘Tempus: Catch-up’, The Times, 25 March 2008.

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'GCap Media: One Previous Owner, Needs Serious Attention' by Grant Goddard

  • 1. GCAP MEDIA: ONE PREVIOUS OWNER, NEEDS SERIOUS ATTENTION GRANT GODDARD 8 April 2008
  • 2. ExecutiveSummary The Board of GCap Media, the UK’s largest commercial radio group, is recommending to its shareholders that they accept an acquisition offer of £375 million by Global Radio, the UK’s third largest commercial radio group. The recommendation, announced on 31st March 2008, brings to a close a 15- week period during which Global tabled three consecutive offers for GCap, culminating in the final price of 225 pence. This represents a substantial premium over the stock’s all-time low of 120.5 pence reached on Christmas Eve 2007. It effectively brings to a close the company’s tortured three-year existence, during which its market capitalisation plummeted from £711 million at the time of its creation in 2005 (from the merger of GWR Group and Capital Radio Group) to a low of £200 million at the end of 2007. If shareholders accept, there will be regulatory review by Ofcom and the Office of Fair Trading, with possible referral to the Competition Commission. By combining GCap with its existing radio portfolio acquired in 2007 from Chrysalis, Global Radio will control 41% of UK commercial radio listening, the first time that such a significant proportion of the sector has belonged to a single owner. Additionally, GCap currently holds the contract for the sale of national advertising on Guardian Media Group’s radio stations, which account for 11% of commercial radio listening. Competition issues could be raised in some local radio markets, particularly in the Midlands/Birmingham and London, where GCap/Global’s share is considerably higher than its 41% national average. Divestment of stations might ultimately prove necessary, although Ofcom will argue to the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission that the commercial radio advertising landscape has changed significantly since the last acquisition of this scale was considered in 2005, potentially reducing regulatory hurdles to consolidation. Global has stated that the acquisition of GCap will “allow it to extract significant operational benefits, pursue growth opportunities and focus on increasing the quality of its offering for its employees, advertisers and listeners”.1 Our opinion is that such a balanced approach will be essential to the enlarged group’s future success. Whilst there will undoubtedly be opportunities to remove costs duplicated across both groups, it will also prove necessary to divert significant amounts to the production of content with renewed appeal for audiences, and to the marketing of stations, both activities that GCap tragically neglected. In this way, GCap/Global will hopefully be able to compete more effectively with the BBC which, as Global notes, “today dominates the UK radio landscape”.2 If the acquisition of GCap by Global is approved by shareholders, then 87% of UK commercial radio listening will be in the hands of privately held companies. This is a significant change from even a year ago, when 80% of commercial radio listening was controlled by publicly quoted companies. The hope is that the sector’s newly acquired cloak of privacy from the City will encourage players to focus more carefully on long-term objectives rather than on short-term achievements, a phenomenon which has dogged much of its performance during the last decade.
  • 4. Introduction The culmination of Global Radio’s 15-week campaign to take control of GCap Media has ended with the GCap Board’s acceptance of its third offer made on 4th March 2008 at 225 pence per share, an 86% premium over the prevailing price (121 pence) prior to the press leak of Global’s initial offer in early January 2008. The revenue multiple achieved by the sale (1.9x) is lower than last year’s acquisitions of Emap Radio and Chrysalis Radio, reflecting GCap’s lower operating margins and the poor performances of many of its brands. Because of Global’s need to create ‘scale’ for its existing business, the actual price paid by Global is more likely to reflect its needs, rather than any explicit value placed upon GCap’s individual assets. Table 1 Recent commercial radio group acquisitions [Source: Enders Analysis] On 7th December 2007, it became inevitable that GCap would be acquired by Global, and sooner rather than later. On that date, Emap announced it would sell its radio and magazine businesses to German publisher H. Bauer for £1.14 billion, a deal that proved immensely disappointing for Global Radio which had expected to acquire Emap Radio. Global was very frustrated that its own bid for Emap Radio had been so close to the (somewhat notional) price of £422 million that Emap accepted from Bauer (though Emap’s decision may have been partly driven by its desire to divest radio without regulatory strings attached, making a German company with no existing UK radio holdings an ideal buyer). Now, the only other substantial radio business publicly available for Global to acquire was GCap and so, with its failed £420 million offer for Emap Radio burning a hole in its pocket, it proved imperative for Global to mount a bid for GCap. For Global, the difference between acquiring Emap and GCap is that the former was an efficiently run business with a healthy mix of old and new brands, whereas the GCap portfolio is dominated by old brands that, with the exception of Classic FM, appear to be in terminal decline with listeners. For Global, Emap had represented an almost ideal merger with myriad opportunities to integrate its key brands (Global’s Galaxy with Emap’s Kiss for the youth demographic; Global’s Heart and Emap’s Magic for the older demographic). GCap, on the other hand, comprises a mixed bag of radio stations that have developed piecemeal from successive waves of acquisition since the 1980s, rather than from a joined-up strategy for a radio group. As a result, Global is acquiring GCap as a ‘fixer-upper’ that is almost three times its own size and which has a recent track record so poor that the challenge of
  • 5. turning it around would prove daunting for any buyer (see GCap Media – the end of the road [2008-01e]). MarketPower Global suddenly becomes the largest player in the commercial radio business, commanding 41% of commercial radio listening, and having risen from nowhere within the last year. It was only in June 2007 that Global Radio was created to acquire Chrysalis Radio for £170 million in a transaction that was part of Chrysalis co-founder Chris Wright’s long-term strategy to cash out of the music businesses he had built since 1967. Global not only acquired the Chrysalis stations (accounting for 11% of commercial radio listening) but also Chrysalis’ existing contract to sell national advertising for Guardian Media Group’s radio stations (a further 11% share). However, in October 2007, Global lost the GMG contract (to GCap) and was left with a radio sales department working at half capacity. It desperately needed greater scale in a medium that depends heavily upon the ability to deliver many millions of listeners to advertisers, and it was GCap alone which offered that opportunity. Table 2 Commercial radio broadcasters ranked by listening [Source: Enders Analysis based on RAJAR Q4 2007] The landscape of commercial radio ownership has changed dramatically during the last year. At the beginning of 2007, 80% of commercial radio listening was in the hands of publicly quoted companies. Following Bauer’s acquisition of Emap Radio, and Global’s purchases of Chrysalis and GCap, 87% of commercial radio listening will now be in private hands. This returns the commercial radio sector broadly to how it was in 1987, prior to the then largest group Capital Radio’s listing on the London Stock Exchange, an innovation followed by many of its competitors. In the 1990s, commercial radio became the darling of the City, culminating in Capital Radio’s share price reaching the dizzy heights of £19.38 in 2000, but the sector fell massively from grace thereafter. Public ownership suited the industry well while it was riding the crest of a successful expansionist period. However, the bubble burst when commercial radio was shown not to have an effective competitive strategy against a resurgent BBC radio. Since then, commercial radio’s audiences, revenues and stock prices have fallen sharply.
  • 6. Commercial radio’s hope is that its newly restored cloak of privacy will permit management the time and space to focus on longer-term issues that the day- to-day scrutiny of the stock market did not allow. For Global, the task of turning around GCap is likely to take several years and will require significant investment in research and marketing in order to create innovative content with mass appeal. Global Chairman Charles Allen is often characterised as a ‘slash and burn’ consolidator, much as Ralph Bernard had been when Chief Executive of GCap and its predecessor GWR Group, until his departure in December 2007. Although there will inevitably be duplicated costs across the two entities that can be stripped out, Global will have to restore direction to some of GCap’s brands that have had much of the life sucked out of them in recent years. Whereas the post-Allen ITV has become a largely homogenous national network with a lower cost base, it is our opinion that GCap’s local brands would benefit from a greater focus on local content that would truly differentiate them from the BBC’s successful national networks. Although the combined GCap/Global operation will have a 41% share of commercial radio listening averaged across the whole UK, its market concentrations will be markedly higher in some local areas, potentially raising competition issues. In London, GCap/Global will own five FM local stations and two AM local stations (plus national Classic FM), commanding 48% of commercial radio listening, whereas its nearest rival Bauer Radio owns only two FM stations in the market. In Birmingham, GCap/Global will own three FM stations and one AM station, and listening overlaps with neighbouring GCap local stations push the group’s share beyond 60%. Table 3 Share of commercial radio listening in GCap/Global Radio local markets [Source: RAJAR Q4 2007] Whether station disposals will be required on competition grounds in London and Birmingham is unclear as yet, because the regulatory landscape has
  • 7. changed significantly since the last radio transactions of this scale took place in 2005, which concerned Emap’s acquisition of Scottish Radio Holdings and the GWR/Capital Radio Group merger. Ofcom published a lengthy research report in 2006 on the radio advertising market whose conclusions, it said, “could potentially smooth the way for more consolidation under competition rules, in particular insofar as it relates to large metropolitan markets” (see UK Commercial Radio Consolidation [2007-88]).3 Ofcom’s argument that radio advertising is part of a wider media advertising market, both at the local and national levels, has yet to be offered in evidence to the Office of Fair Trading or the Competition Commission, making it difficult to know whether either will be convinced that commercial radio local market concentrations are no longer such a critical metric of competition. Future Strategies Global now has to consider some of the same pressing issues that GCap Chief Executive Fru Hazlitt had tackled in the ‘defence strategy’ she unveiled on 11th February 2008. These include: • GCap’s shareholding in the national commercial radio DAB multiplex (Digital One) which Hazlitt intended to divest • GCap’s digital-only radio stations which Hazlitt intended to close (TheJazz has already closed, though Planet Rock has been reprieved) • GCap’s Xfm stations which Hazlitt planned to sell (or close) • GCap’s investments in 24 local DAB multiplexes • The poor performances of GCap’s The One and Gold networks • Ofcom’s re-advertisement of the Classic FM national FM licence in 2010 as a sealed bid auction. GCap/Global’s future strategy for DAB, in particular, will inevitably impact the whole radio industry (both BBC and commercial) because of the scale of GCap’s investments in all aspects of its vertically integrated DAB radio business (transmission, platform, content and advertising sales). Although the Department for Culture Media & Sport’s Digital Radio Working Party will not publish its final report until year-end 2008, its Chairman Barry Cox admitted that “some of our questions may get answered for us before we have finished [our deliberations]”.4 For example, Global might decide to retain GCap’s majority shareholding in the national DAB multiplex in order to lease excess capacity to Channel Four for its digital radio aspirations. This could prove an effective way to suck ‘new money’ into the presently impoverished commercial radio DAB eco-structure. Global Chairman Charles Allen insists rightly that GCap’s “brands and assets are highly complementary to those of the Global Radio Group”.5 Press speculation has centred on Global replacing some of GCap’s The One Network stations with its own Heart brand, although the audiences for the two services do not create a perfect fit because listeners to The One Network are generally younger and more downmarket than those of Heart. Elsewhere, despite GCap’s Xfm and Global’s Galaxy brands sharing very similar audience demographics, their music formats (which are embedded in their
  • 8. Ofcom licences) are distinct and complementary. Young people will probably tend to listen to either Xfm’s modern rock/indie music or Galaxy’s dance music, but not both, making it difficult to combine these networks into one. Table 4 GCap and Global Radio network audiences [Source: Enders Analysis based on RAJAR Q4 2007] Although consolidation offers owners a tempting opportunity to re-brand local radio stations, such actions in the past have often produced unwelcome consequences. GCap’s re-branding of Xfm Scotland, Emap’s re-branding of its Magic network, GMG’s re-branding of London’s Smooth FM, and The Local Radio Company’s re-branding of its stations have all demonstrated how fraught with danger it can be to tamper with a station’s name, image or music format. As one newspaper leader recently pointed out to Global, “people have a very different relationship with their favourite radio brands than they do with television” so that “changing the name of some [GCap] local or regional radio stations would probably be met with resistance in some cities”.6 GCap has already standardised the logos and the on-air sound of its One Network local stations during the last year, with little result so far. At the heart of Global’s plans for GCap will be former Capital Radio Group Programme Director Richard Park, who was appointed Global Radio’s Executive Director immediately after it acquired Chrysalis. Whereas Global Chairman Allen will be looking to cut costs in the newly merged group, Park will need to command sufficient resources to create compelling content that can tempt listeners back to commercial radio. Compared to television, successful radio content is relatively cheap to produce. More so than money, winning radio programming requires creativity, determination and risk-taking, something that Park excelled at in the 1990s at Capital. The question is – will Park’s skills still be as relevant today to the current radio infrastructure, and will Park be able to pull off the resurrection of GCap that others have failed to do since he quit Capital in 2001 to become Headmaster of TV’s Fame Academy? The future shape of the entire commercial radio industry, not just GCap/Global, will very much hinge upon the successful execution of Park’s turnaround strategy in the next five years. [First published by Enders Analysis as report 2008-32.]
  • 9. © 2008 Grant Goddard Published by Radio Books http://www.radiobooks.org http://www.grantgoddard.co.uk 1 Global Radio Group Limited. Offer For GCap Media plc, 31 March 2008. 2 Global Radio Group Limited. Offer For GCap Media plc, 31 March 2008. 3 Ofcom. Review of Media Ownership Rules, 14 November 2006, p.64. 4 Department for Culture, Media & Sport. Stakeholders Seminar, 10 March 2008. 5 Global Radio Group Limited. Offer For GCap Media plc, 31 March 2008. 6 Amanda Andrews. ‘Tempus: Catch-up’, The Times, 25 March 2008.