CASE STUDY OF ‘’NYXTA STON RYTHMO’’
THE STRUCTURE:
1. The Case “NYXTA AT RYTHMOS” Facebook Live show is the first conceived, created and established Facebook live show in Greece by a radio station, in this case, Rythmos 949 (ΡΥΘΜΟΣ 949), one of the leading radio stations broadcasting in Athens, Greece.
The purpose of this case study is to examine in depth what led to the creation of this live show, how it successfully changed not only the consumers’ perception of a radio station but the perception of the radio employees as well, while setting a benchmark for other live shows delivered through the Facebook platform in Greece. We will also share details about how we took leverage of 1:1 marketing strategy in order to establish a true and ongoing relation with our listeners/viewers, making great steps into personalizing our connection with them.
2. The Digital Transformation of a Traditional Medium There is no doubt that digital transformation is one of the top priorities of every ‘’traditional’’ organization/industry. Radio is one of the media industries that has been definitely influenced by technology advancements in the past years and the era of digital age & social media is the latest to put great pressure on it. Listening habits over the years have changed drastically and people have therefore transitioned from various traditional –off line- to streaming platforms. Despite radio being an ‘’old-fashion media’’, people never neglected the unique characteristics of it and kept on developing an engaging relation with it. Digital & social media proved to be an added opportunity for the radio industry, in order to connect more with our listeners, instead of being a threat, if meticulous strategic decisions were applied.
Peter Drucker, “the man who invented management” as stated by Business Week magazine shortly before he died on 2005, claimed that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” and there is no doubt for that. Regarding the digital transformation of our group, culture is the main point of interest as there are people of great differences cooperating every single day so as to keep the business going forward optimally. The “digital age” is not about the new tools technology has to offer. It is about the change of true perception of one’s thinking and making it digital first.
Apart from that, we should take into consideration what Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates and one of the media industry’s leading analysts, said “Twenty-plus years into the digital revolution, the radio industry is struggling to hold onto long-time listeners and advertisers while attempting to puzzle out how best to build out their digital offerings. A few radio companies are figuring it out, the local media research outfit, but too many still see their job as selling radio spots, with digital a side-line. To do it right, they need to rethink their businesses to focus on how they can put radio and the full range of digital offerings to work for advertisers, with the goal of driving sales, and doing it better than competitors.”
Straight up, the biggest threat to radio is myopic leadership. We’re in a period of remarkable growth and opportunity, yet so many leaders believe their job is to defend the medium. The industry needs leaders who spend more energy pursuing growth. The industry needs leaders who see dashboards, podcasts, and smart speakers as opportunities instead of threats. It needs people who truly understand they have the assets and tools to leverage themselves into a much broader business than terrestrial radio.
Culture comprises the values and characteristic set of behaviours that define how things get done in an organization. A healthy culture provides the guidelines — the tacit code of conduct — that steer individuals to act appropriately and make choices that advance the organization’s goals and strategy. We see three important reasons for instilling a digital culture during a digital transformation.
The power of a digital transformation strategy lies in its scope and objectives. Less digitally mature organizations tend to focus on individual technologies and have strategies that are decidedly operational in focus. Digital strategies in the most mature organizations are developed with an eye on transforming the business as one unit.
Maturing digital organizations build skills to carry outthe strategy. Digitally maturing organizations are four times more likely to provide employees with needed skills than are organizations at lower ends of the spectrum. Consistent with our overall findings, the ability to conceptualize how digital technologies can impact the business is a skill lacking in many companies at the early stages of digital maturity.
Employees want to work for digital leaders. Across age groups from 22 to 60, the vast majority of respondents want to work for digitally enabled organizations. Employees will be on the lookout for the best digital opportunities, and businesses will have to continually up their digital game to retain and attract them.
Taking risks becomes a cultural norm. Digitally maturing organizations are more comfortable taking risks than their less digitally mature peers. To make their organizations less risk averse, business leaders have to embrace failure as a prerequisite for success. They must also address the likelihood that employees may be just as risk averse as their managers and will need support to become bolder.
The digital agenda is led from the top. Maturing organizations are nearly twice as likely to have a single person or group leading the effort. In addition, employees in digitally maturing organizations are highly confident in their leaders’ digital fluency. Digital fluency, however, doesn’t demand mastery of the technologies. Instead, it requires the ability to articulate the value of digital technologies to the organization’s future.
3. How & why we came up with the live concept Live content delivered through Facebook aka ‘’ Facebook Live ‘’ provided us with the opportunity to save on “traditional” broadcast expenses and focus 100% our effort on the quality of the content developed. Three years ago, “Rythmos 949” radio station developed and produced its first live content effort “RYTHMOS LOUNGE” a prequel of “NYXTA AT RYTHMOS”, a live show streaming on www.rythmosfm.gr (website property). “RYTHMOS LOUNGE’’ invited leading artists to perform one singlesong they loved that was previously performed by another artist, and the duration of the show was maximum 6 minutes. The promotion of the show was based on a recall marketing strategy with a 360 campaign, aiming to make people connect to “rythmosfm.gr” website at the exact time and date advertised.
4. The Coolness recovery opportunity Without any doubt, every brand wants to become a “cool” one. In today’s marketplace of constant change and technological advances, many consumers want to look “cool” as well. Being “cool” offers a way for them to impress and interact with others and to define and feel good about themselves. In other words, coolness affords social status and serves as a tool for building a favourable identity. So, it is of little surprise that consumers often value and buy brands that they perceive to be cool.
Consumer psychologists, have spent a lot of time discussing about “cool” brands. Consumers can easily tell which brand is generally perceived as “cool”, but they can rarely explain why.
Based on research made by Margaret C. Campbell (professor of marketing at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado at Boulder & Caleb Warren, assistant professor of marketing at Texas A&M University, these are the five critical elements of “coolness”.
1. Coolness is socially constructed: Cool is not an inherent feature of an object or person, but is an attribution bestowed by an audience. Brands and people are not inherently cool; they are cool only to the extent that other consumers consider them cool.
2. Coolness is subjective and dynamic: What consumers consider cool change over time and across consumers. The extent to which a particular product or brand is cool can vary depending on when and whom you ask. What you think is cool is likely to be different from what your kid thinks is cool and what your mother thought was cool when she was your age.
3. Coolness is desirable: Despite the variation in the objects considered cool, coolness is perceived to be a positive quality; people like products and brands that are cool. The reason people seek cool is that it is valued, by themselves and others. Coolness provides social status and identity.
4. Coolness requires more than mere perception that a product is positive or desirable: Not all products and brands that are liked are considered cool. Consumers perceive some quality that sets cool things apart. And, whereas there is agreement that some particular quality makes something cool, it is hard for people to pinpoint what this additional quality is.
5. Coolness expresses autonomy: Most important, what makes a product or brand cool, rather than just likable, classy, or fun, is that it expresses autonomy. Cool people and brands go their own way and do their own thing. To be cool, a brand needs to follow its own path, regardless of the norms, beliefs, or expectations of others.
5. Setting up a live show from A to Z 100% on our own | assigning roles & establishing a team “NYXTA” as a show, was planned and executed solely by Antenna Music team members. The production team consists of 5 people, including the host. Roles where assigned based on each members’ background skills as well as temperament.The location was carefully chosen in order to serve the brand strategy, as well as the Antenna Group philosophy. The music production studio where the show is aired from, is owned by “Ant1 Media Lab”, the journalism and sound engineer school owned by Antenna Group. Hence, the attending faculty as well as the students, are all being trained on real situation cases. The marketing team, created all visual communication, on and off air, the 360o promotional plan, as well as the full setup of the new YouTube channel, SEO, tags, monitoring etc.
6. Media Planning / Promotion A 360 media promotional strategy was strategically chosen as the most appropriate one for ‘’NYXTA AT RYTHMOS’’. Being part of the Antenna Media Group, owning a major free television channel in Greece as well as publications such as OK! Magazine, we took advantage of the offline media placement opportunities available to us so as to succeed in our strategy. Print ads and TVCs’ timely placed before the live event have been a part of our media mix, while great effort has been put on digital ads too. Facebook Audience network has been our exclusive digital media paid placement thanks to the very low cost of reaching our target audience mainly through story ads which for the time being deliver on low cpm (average cost per 1000 people reach has been 0,60 euro) and high recall probably thanks to their full screen format. Regarding the audience targeting, we first aimed for people who had already liked or engaged with our Facebook page. At the same time, we targeted the fans of the featured artist. Later on, we took advantage of remarketing techniques, retargeting also people who had viewed at least 10 seconds of our previous Facebook live shows. Part of our promotional plan was also “push notification marketing” by notifying users on our mobile application in order to tune in on our live show.
7. The chatbot & 1:1 marketing strategy Personalized or 1:1 marketing has been a major goal for all top brands during the last years. Personalizing the ‘’NYXTA AT RYTHMOS’’ experience through interaction with each and every viewer was a big challenge for us. Keeping in touch again and again in order to invite them to be a part of our upcoming show, without “spamming” them, was even harder.
1. Manually “like” each comment: The Facebook Live Show generated a great amount of comments and we felt that people expected recognition and action taken from our part. We went forward liking manually every single one comment (on average 3k comments per live show)
2. Messenger retargeting campaign: Having the ability to message directly people who had commented on our previous live shows, we decided to deliver “F.Name” personalized messages informing people that their favourite artists songs where available to watch/listen also on YouTube and specifically the official Rythmos 949 channel “RythmosTube”. Having messaged approximately 3k people who also responded back, we build an audience that we could message in bulk using a tool like “Manychat”. Thus, during every live show we sent them personalized messages reminding them to watch our live show the time it was actually live. The results were much higher than expected, with an average of 90% open rate. Between 600 and 1k were converted almost instantly to live viewers.
8. The stats of the show
9. YouTube Channel | establishing a new organic media channel that delivers more than 37M impressions per month
“RythmosTube” is the brand-new media entry of Rythmos 949 on YouTube. Together with the establishment of our first Facebook Live Show, we paused all actions of the previous YouTube channel owned by Rythmos 949 for more than 7 years, and created the new one “RythmosTube”. The strategic decision was made based on the importance of establishing a strong video content marketing channel VS the old one who had non-coherent old fashioned content, sometimes even irrelevant to our viewers.
NYXTA AT RYTHMOS is for now the main source of content for our new YouTube Channel, providing us with best in kind live performance songs exclusively from A’ Greek artists. Till now (15 months) our YouTube Channel has more than 50.000.000 million views and a stunning of 138.000.000 million content impressions. We should note that as of 2019 we consider our YouTube channel the most important one regarding our ‘’organic branding’’ promotion as in a world of always declining social media organic reach, YouTube as a media investment delivers not only to brand exposure but also brand attention considering our channel’s total watch time.
10. NTR (YouTube & Live Show Monetization) Both RythmosTube & our Facebook Live Show have been a new source of non-traditional revenue. We monetize our content on YouTube through ads placed by google and reinvest most of the revenue generated back to our live show so as to enhance in each way possible. Apart from that, we natively monetized our Facebook live show partnering with WIND, a leading telecommunications provider in Greece, communicating their tagline in the most native and non-intrusive way.
11. Our people said about the show (coming up)
12. Artists said about the show (coming up)
13. Sum Up On the whole, there is no doubt that ‘’NYXTA STON RYTHMO’’ has been a game-changer regarding the production and the promotion of a live show delivered through an online platform. We are more than happy to live in an era in which there are unlimited technology tools that enable us to deliver truly unique experiences to our audience while establishing a new kind of ‘’connection’’ with each one of them. We are more than confident, seeing the tremendous success of our Facebook live show that embracing change and adopting a trial & error approach in every new idea presented & adopted, is the best way to keep up with the ‘’consumers’’ needs while transforming in meaningful ways ourselves and our ‘’traditional’’ industry.
This case study was developed and written by Domnika Skreta (Head of Marketing & Communications) at Antenna Music Group and Vasilis Plegas (Digital Marketing Coordinator)
