AF Radio — The future and beyond.
85 percent of households in developing countries have a radiobox. This is because radio is still a beautiful medium for sending messages across Africa. Coups have been started on radio. Your grandparent can remember something that happened in 1951 that they heard on radio. When you turned 18, your best friend gave you a shout out and everyone heard. It was joy! Shared excitement. You remember a time when you won money on a contests just from answering questions correctly on radio. All our memories in one way or another, feature a “radio memory. It is as real to us all as day, due to how personal it is.
It is built on shared information, community and entertainment. It is a potent combination, because it is reliable, communal and exciting. Which is why birthday shout outs or just shout outs still sound so good on radio. The beautiful thing about radio is that with every new generation that is born, radio evolves. What we talk about on radio says a lot about who we are as a society. Due to this, there is an intimacy that is still in radio… because feelings and energy is spread every day at a certain time. Radio is a sure thing built to entertain everyone and so are we. Today, the radio community is millions strong in Ghana and beyond.
Some people might argue that radio is dying or stuck in a rut. But the numbers say otherwise. Radio like everything else, will evolve and technology is one of the things that will fast track this evolution process.
The way we consume radio and every other audio content for that matter, will constantly evolve and grow to accommodate our demands of today, and AF Radio is here to see it through. At AF Radio we want to continue to uphold these values that radio as a medium stands for in Africa while we help it evolve and catch up to todays technical trends. The way our grandparents listened to radio some twenty years ago is not the same way we listen to radio today. Yet radio as an industry in Africa has been stuck in “ways of the past” while it fails to meet the demands of the growing tech savy population of today.
At AF Radio our vision is to become the medium of choice to improve the entire value chain right from content production right down to how listeners dicover new content. With the launch of our AdMaxx platform; an audio ads network, in the coming days, we want to start from how content producers derive value from their efforts, to how brands reach potential customers in a cost effective and efficient way. We will begin in Ghana by connecting brands to audiences in Ghana through ways they can control and track. We have built this technology in house, carefully with both audio content producers and brands in mind. This is our first attempt and our vision is to reach all of Africa by 2023.
AdMaxx is built upon one of our main product; AF Radio which allows people to discover new content that they will love and playback the ones they missed, whenever, wherever, while enabling radio stations to transform their live content into podcasts and make it easily accessible to the public. With partnerships with some of Ghana’s biggest media houses such us Multimedia Ghana and Omni Media Ghana (Citi FM), we believe that we are well on track to transform how a whole industry works. We are also working with MTN Ghana to cut down the data cost involved in listening to online audio content, in a way the benefits both producers and consumers. We believe, these steps will make it possbile for audio content to reach millions more than it has ever reached, in even more remote locations.
As we aspire to become a medium of choice for a platform that has told our stories for over a hundred years, at AF Radio we say — to a few hundreds more. This is still the beginning of a long journey, and we invite you to join us as we build the future. Follow us on Twitter @AFRadioHQ and on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/AFRadioHQ and be first to learn whats next for us.
With AdMaxx, we look forward to helping you get your message out into the world and be heard.