2015 within Earshot – review of the year

It’s that annual “now where did I put the Analytics password” moment. Ah, here it is.

What an interesting year on the blog. Here’s a list of the most popular articles we’ve written in 2015:

Your favourite articles of 2015

10. Global Radio presenters star in BT campaign

A good example of doing something creative at scale with a major client, thanks to Global’s range of brands and talent.

9. Podcast – local jingles for Eagle Radio

The first episode of our new podcast series goes smashing into the top ten with contributions from Ollie Melville Smith and UKRD’s Peter Gordon. And my daughter pops-up in the middle as a guest interviewer. I’m sure that helps.

8. Imaging Radio Everyone

An incredible worldwide project from Reelworld with Peter Gabriel, heard by billions. See how it was achieved.

7. Will Periscope be ‘a thing’ for radio?

JJ spotted the Periscope trend early. The answer seems to be yes.

6. Our live blog of The Imaging Days, day two

I attended this event to report back on the trends, the personalities and the audio I heard in a big shed outside Amsterdam.

5. How Lucozade has synced live radio and outdoor ads

This is a clever amalgam of scheduled radio spots and automatically-triggered digital outdoor. JJ has the lowdown.

4. Our live blog of The Imaging Days, day one

Same big shed, different audio and eclipsing day two in our chart of the year.

3. 50 Shades of Grey on the radio

In this tireless pull-together, Jonathan celebrates some of the crazy promotional work radio stations did to mark the opening of the Fifty Shades movie. It’s all done in the best possible taste.

2. The former radio DJ who cheers-up train passengers

The story of former radio imaging producer James Beckingham proved incredibly popular. This article was picked-up by a couple of other publications who linked back and James went on to be nominated for a driver of the year award.

1. Matt Fisher’s amazing BBC Radio 1 Big Weekend mashup

There’s nothing like brilliant, shareable work to spark the interest of Earshot readers, and so it proved with Matt’s harmonic mixing tour-de-force. Learn the story behind the piece in our article and see Matt’s crazy track laydown:

Also, check-out our reports from The Imaging Days where Matt revealed some of his production secrets.

Recurrents

Those above are all new articles from the past year, but on the site some slightly older stories have also proved popular in 2015:

Six tips for using Skype on the radio

New sound and imaging for Bauer’s Place portfolio

The 40 greatest radio promotions ever

Creative marketing ideas from Student Radio

Where you are

I was curious to see the places in which Earshot readers are based. Thankfully, Google Analytics has the answers:

10. Bristol

Biggest city in the West of England, a large media & tech hub and home to Banksy.

9. Edinburgh

Capital City of Scotland. Site of August pilgrimage for devout Guardian readers.

8. New York, USA

Blimey! One of two non-UK cities to feature in our top ten. Yo.

7. Guildford, Surrey.

Leafy city that’s probably quite proud to beat New York in any rankings.

6. Leeds, West Yorkshire.

Large flood-prone city in the North of England. Thinking of you.

5. Dublin, Ireland

Capital city of Ireland, big media hub and the second non-British city in this list.

4. Birmingham, West Midlands

The mighty beating heart of the English Midlands. Competitive radio market and home to Orion Media.

3. Glasgow, Scotland

Scotland’s biggest city and home to Bauer, Global and the BBC in Scotland.

2. Manchester

Includes bolt-on towns like, er, Bolton and Salford, home to Media City UK where the BBC, Reelworld, Ignite Jingles and Radio Today all live.

1. London

Jonathan Jacob took me to a place in London that charges more than £6 for a beer but it remains the greatest city on planet earth and it is Earshot’s spiritual home.

That’s all rather predictable but the presence deeper in the top 25 of Dubai, Cape Town, Sydney, Minnesota, New Delhi and Serbia’s Novi Sad adds some exotic interest.

Technology

What devices and browsers are you using? Things are moving more mobile but 57% of Earshot sessions are still on desktop screens, 34% are on mobile, and 8% on tablets. That tablet number has fallen, probably because of the growth of bigger screened phones.

The leading mobile device for reading Earshot is of course the media worker’s favourite, the Apple iPhone. Indeed, just over half of all mobile sessions have come from iPhones in 2015. The rest of the mobile top ten comprises a bunch of various Galaxy S devices from Samsung, the Motorola Moto G, the HTC M8 and the lovely Google Nexus 5. Nice to see you showing some class.

On the desktop, you’re Chrome lovers first, followed by Safari, Firefox and then Internet Explorer. There’s a bit of Opera and Edge action down in the noise and I must give a special shout-out to the one person who reads Earshot on a Playstation 3. You know who you are.

2016

Aside from the popular articles, I managed to implement some of the development things planned for this past year but, truth be told, not all of them.

After family, you’ll understand that contracted commitments must come first. In addition, the unexpected request to help to provide emergency healthcare information to communities in Ebola-affected countries of West Africa took a natural priority in my life. That, and the launch of a major new radio news product for the global young called BBC Minute limited the amount of time I could commit to side projects like Earshot.

So, I’m rolling-over some development objectives into 2016 and, to help, the effervescent Hayley Hayes will join Jonathan Jacob and me as we search for interesting content to share on the blog and the Earshot podcast which has just started a new series.

What are you up to?

Whether you’re on a national brand or a small community station, privately owned or public service, please continue to keep us across the production projects you’re involved in that could inspire other creatives and help make radio promotion more rewarding for listeners and more effective for clients and your station. You can write to me at steve@earshotcreative.com or Jonathan at jonathan@earshotcreative.com

While we don’t directly publish press releases as news stories we do love to see them. Our email address for that is news@earshotcreative.com

Thanks

Finally, my personal thanks to a few radio friends and organisations who continue to support the independent, and hopefully educational, work we do within Earshot.

Anthony Gay and his amazing team at Reelworld, Kevin Leach at ipDTL and all the UK radio groups from the BBC to Bauer to Folder to UTV to UKRD to Global in the UK and many many more around the world who have helped us share their best inspiring creative work in 2015

Thanks to you all and best wishes for the new year,

Steve Martin