Not quite as good as Radio 4

Since November 2014, Gavin Oldham’s Share Radio has been quietly broadcasting about money.

The station took out some local above the line advertising at launch but its content has settled down now, it has a more confident rhythm on air, has amassed more than one thousand podcast episodes across multiple channels, and has gone live nationally on DAB.

Its new vertical half-page print ad in satirical British magazine Private Eye suggests a fresh confidence about the brand.

Share Radio ad in Private Eye. (yes I need a new scanner)

The Advertising Standards Authority may not before have dealt with such a jokey subjective claim as this.

Its rules say:

“unless it is obviously puffery, the ASA is likely to regard superiority claims as objective”.

But this is hardly a superiority claim, rather the kind of tongue in cheek self-deprecation that readers of Private Eye magazine will appreciate. They do hate pomposity.

The ad certainly gets your attention, does a positioning job pretty well marking-out Share Radio as purely about money, and it shows the station is self-aware and doesn’t take itself too seriously.

It would be stronger still if it acknowledged the audience and suggested some benefits to them of listening.

History

Before LBC gets on its high horse over the Share Radio ad, veteran radio programmer Paul Easton has been in touch via twitter.com/earshotcreative to point out that ‘knocking copy’ is nothing new.

Take this from 1973, and see who was doing the knocking back then. Surely not LBC. It’s almost worthy of Private Eye.