ASIA

 New York Festivals® 2023 Radio Awards competition is open for entries.New York Festivals Radio Awards 65-year legacy provides a showcase to celebrate world-class storytellers from around the globe The competition honors creative innovation and excellence in broadcast and audio content across all genres and platforms.“Journalists today are finding new ways to keep viewers informed and engaged in our ever-changing and interconnected world.  Here at New York Festivals, we want to be able to amplify their dedication with categories tailored for those purposes,” said Rose Anderson, VP & Executive Director, New York Festivals Radio Awards, “along with stories that show how individual actions can change the world and the ability of the human spirit to triumph over adversity.”  In keeping pace with global and industry-wide trends, New York Festivals Radio Awards has added two additional categories that reflect the evolving industry.Documentary categories award in-depth storytelling explored through sound with a distinctive point of view. New for 2023: Investigative Journalism and Best Nonfiction Series. View the 2023 NYF Radio Awards extensive category roster: HERE.In the 2022 awards, from Asia, Indian entries led with one bronze and 10 finalist cartificates. Mediacorp Singapore earned two finalist certificates while Radio Taiwan International got one finalist nomination.The Grand Awards for 2022’s Radio Awards competition were “Have You Heard George’s Podcast?” – from BBC Sounds & BBC Radio 5 Live, “U.Me: The Musical” – Magnum Opus Broadcasting, and “The Sounds of America” BMP Audio.New York Festivals Storytellers Gala honored Sean McManus, Chairman of CBS Sports with the twelfth annual New York Festivals® Lifetime Achievement Award.RTÉ Radio Ireland was the 2022 Broadcaster of the Year and HarperCollins Publishers was honored with Radio Production Company of the Year.For 2022 New York Festivals celebrated award-winning entries during the New York Festivals 2022 Storytellers Gala virtual event taking place on April 26th at 6PM EST. View the 2022 Storytellers Gala featuring acceptances and winner’s highlights from content creators and creative media executives from around the globe: HERE.The 2023 Storytellers Gala will take place at the annual NAB Show in Las Vegas on April 18, 2023. This is the 13th year of NYF’s and NAB’s strategic partnership.  Radio Award winners will have access to the multi-day event taking place 15 April 2023 to 19 April 2023, which is the world’s largest global gathering for the media and entertainment industry.New York Festivals Radio Awards receives entries from radio stations, networks, and independent producers from over 30 countries around the globe. The mission of the competition is to honor the achievements of the men and women who make up the global audio storytelling community. To view the 2022 winner’s Gallery, visit: HERE.New York Festivals invites award-winning industry leaders from around the world to become members of their world-class Radio Awards Grand Jury. The 2023 Grand jury will be recruited in the coming weeks. Those jurors will include some of the most world’s recognizable voices and captivating content producers in the radio industry. Entries are judged on production values, creativity, content presentation, direction, writing, achievement of purpose, and audience suitability.All Entries in NYF’s 2023 Radio Awards will be judged by the NYF Grand Jury of 200+ producers, directors, writers, and other creative media professionals from around the globe. Award-winning entries will be showcased on the Radio Awards winners gallery. To view the 2022 winner’s gallery, visit HERE.The entry deadline for the 2023 Radio Awards competition is January 21, 2023. To enter please visit: HERE, for additional information visit: Rules and Regulations and 2023 Radio Awards Categories. […]

A household name for those who grew up in Malaysia in the 1970s and 80s, former Radio Televisyen Malaysia (RTM) DJ Constance Haslam passed away in Versailles, France.Heslam, 77, spent 26 years as an announcer on Radio 4, now known as Traxx FM. She was best known for her morning segments on the English language station where she played chart-topping hits on the radio and spoke with listeners.After leaving RTM in 1990, Haslam joined Redifussion Radio for two years and served in its public relations division.The news of her death was announced by her old friend and fellow radio announcer Patrick Teoh on his Facebook page.Teoh said: “Today, I woke up to the sad news that an old friend, colleague and former radio announcer, Connie Haslam, has departed for the big radio station in the sky.“A whole generation of us have listened to her golden voice, reading the news, answering requests and spinning the top hits of the day.” […]

Radio broadcaster Percival Mabasa, better known as Percy Lapid, was shot dead on Monday night atTalon Dos, Las Piñas, Philippines.He was the host of the online broadcast program “Percy Lapid Fire” at DWBL 1242 and was known to be critical of previous and the present administration, touching on topics such as red-tagging and supposed extrajudicial killings.According to his family, he had received a lot of death threats before he was killed. He was on his way home to do an online broadcast when he was gunned down by two unknown assailants.According to the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP), Lapid was the second journalist killed during the term of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The first was radio broadcaster Rey Blanco, who was stabbed to death in Negros Oriental last month.NUJP Secretary General Ronalyn Olea said Lapid was the first in recent years to be killed in Metro Manila. He was also the 196th journalist killed in the country since 1986, the year democracy was restored after the ouster of dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, the father of the current president.In an October 2021 report, the New-York based Committee to Protect Journalists ranked the Philippines seventh on a global impunity index, with 13 murders still unsolved. […]

The BBC World Service has outlined plans to accelerate its digital offering and increase impact with audiences around the globe. This supports the BBC’s strategy, announced earlier this year, to create a modern, digital-led and streamlined organisation that drives the most value from the licence fee and delivers more for audiences.Changing audience needs around the world – with more people accessing news digitally – go alongside a challenging financial climate. High inflation, soaring costs, and a cash-flat Licence Fee settlement have led to tough choices across the BBC, and the BBC’s international services need to make a saving of £28.5m, as part of the wider £500m of annual savings and reinvestment to make the BBC digital-led.The proposals entail a net total of around 382 post closures.The proposals will see seven more language services moving to digital only, modelling the success of others which are already offering purely digital services and performing well with audiences. This means that nearly half of all 41 language services will be digital only.Language services which are already digital only are: Azerbaijani, Brasil, Marathi, Mundo, Punjabi, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese.Language services the BBC is proposing to move to digital only are: Chinese, Gujarati, Igbo, Indonesian, Pidgin, Urdu, and Yoruba.Radio services the BBC is proposing to stop are: Arabic, Persian, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Hindi, Bengali, Chinese, Indonesian, Tamil, and Urdu.The BBC World Service will continue to operate in all the languages and countries where it is currently present, including the new languages added during its expansion in 2016. No language services will close.Some TV and radio programmes will stop under the new plans. BBC Arabic radio and BBC Persian radio will also cease.The World Service will continue to serve audiences during moments of jeopardy and will ensure audiences in countries such as Russia, Ukraine and Afghanistan have access to vital news services, using appropriate broadcast and distribution platforms.World Service English will continue to operate as 24-hour broadcast radio, available around the world. Some new scheduling, programmes and podcasts will be set out in due course.The World Service has already achieved record levels of growth on digital platforms, currently reaching 148m people in an average week. The digital share of World Service Languages reach has more than doubled, from 19 percent to 43 percent since 2018.Director of BBC World Service Liliane Landor says: “The role of the BBC has never been more crucial worldwide. The BBC is trusted by hundreds of millions of people for fair and impartial news, especially in countries where this is in short supply. We help people in times of crisis. We will continue to bring the best journalism to audiences in English and more than 40 languages, as well as increasing the impact and influence of our journalism by making our stories go further.“There is a compelling case for expanding our digital services across the World Service in order to better serve and connect with our audiences. The way audiences are accessing news and content is changing and the challenge of reaching and engaging people around the world with quality, trusted journalism is growing.”The proposed changes to the World Service include:
Focusing on its own platforms and presence in markets, and reducing the volume of syndicated TV and radio content on partners’ platforms in some territories. A focus on impact, rather than reach, means we need more audiences to come to our platforms. This is where audiences most closely associate with the BBC and where we can build long-term engagement.
Creating a new centralised digital-first Commissioning and Newsgathering Content Production Hub to create high-impact content for distribution across all non-English language services.
Moving some production out of London and closer to audiences to drive engagement, for example moving the Thai service from London to Bangkok, the Korean service to Seoul, the Bangla service to Dhaka and the Focus On Africa TV bulletin to broadcast from Nairobi.
Bringing together long-form content activity such as investigations and documentaries made by Africa Eye, the Investigations Unit and BBC Arabic documentaries to ensure a more collaborative approach across our platforms and services to enable stories to travel further across the world, as well as in the UK.
Creating a new China Global Unit based in London to tell the global story of China to the world.
Creating a dynamic Africa content hub that commissions and delivers original, distinctive and impactful digital first content for all 12 African language services, digital, TV/Radio, plus coverage of the continent for the rest of the BBC.
Continuing linear TV broadcasting for both Arabic and Persian languages and investing in building audio and other digital capability in Arabic and Persian to replace radio.
Closing some radio services, for example Arabic, Bangla, Persian and some TV programming on local broadcasters across Africa and Asia.
World Service English making changes to its content and schedules which will allow investment in new initiatives, including a new podcast for younger audiences globally, and developing the podcast offer more broadly. The station also plans to launch a new hour-long science strand from the new science unit in Cardiff, as well as adding more live news and sports programming to the schedule.
These proposals are now subject to consultation with staff and trade unions. […]

Content from BPRRecently I was reminded of how marketing ideas and concepts can vary from spectacular to downright dumb when I came across a presentation by the smart, interesting and always entertaining Mark Ritson presenting his Top 10 list of Bullshit Marketing ideas and concepts.Most people involved in Marketing and media will have their own stories of Bullshit Marketing ideas – viewed from either side of the fence and it doesn’t take much effort to identify a few of these that still exist in most countries in various local and national media.Mark Ritson’s list is more macro and tends to focus on different theories, concepts and ideas that are evaluated on several criteria including:
Nonsense Factor
Damage Score
And the overall marketing BS index.
Of course, most of the comments and criticisms are slightly tongue in cheek but also highlight the risks of committing huge marketing budgets on ethereal concepts like segmenting products into colours or animals.You can find the summary of the 2021 list on YouTube.However, within the narrative of why Bullshit Marketing can be risky, expensive and wasteful, was a timely reminder of the basics of good marketing that can apply equally to media in all forms.
Do my customers (consumers) want it?
Can I deliver it (successfully, professionally and in a compelling way)
Can it be different or meaningfully differentiated from other, similar or competitor products.
The first and last points on this simple list are often overlooked – do the market research and deliver a clear benefit.By Peter Don, BPR […]

Content from BPRI’ve written about the importance of Game Theory previously. But given recent events I thought it would be timely to have another look at the concept, and its importance to a radio station’s overall strategic plan.According to Bloomberg, as China waged military exercises off the coast of Taiwan earlier this month, a group of American defence experts focused on their own simulation of an eventual – but for now entirely hypothetical – US-China war over the island.The unofficial what-if game or Game Theory is being conducted on the fifth floor of an office building not far from the White House, and it posits a US military response to a Chinese invasion in 2026. Even though the participants bring an American perspective, they are finding that a US-Taiwan victory, if there is one, could come at a huge cost.In sessions that will run through September, retired US generals and Navy officers and former Pentagon officials hunch like chess players over tabletops along with analysts from the CSIS think tank. They move forces depicted as blue and red boxes and small wooden squares over maps of the Western Pacific and Taiwan. The results will be released to the public in December.The success of a radio station’s strategy often depends on the strategies of its competitors.As a result of this interdependence, the ability to anticipate your competitors’ strategies is essential. And this highlights the importance of strategic-planning tools such as Game Theory and Scenario Planning.How many times in a strategy meeting do you ask: what if a competitor station changed format?….what if we changed format?….what if we lost our successful morning show?Knowing what you would do in a certain situation is one thing.But the other key aspect of Game Theory is correctly defining what your competitors would do.This is not easy.You need the ability to reverse-engineer the moves of competitors and predict what they are likely to do, what they will avoid doing and what they are actually capable of doing.Getting inside your competitors’ heads is difficult because radio stations (and their decision makers) are usually very different. They often have different cultures, different theories on programming strategy, different budgetary pressures and always…..different talent in their line-up.To use the China/Taiwan/US analogy…different warfare techniques, different weapons and most importantly different political systems and cultures.To really play Game Theory you have to think like your competitors……not think like you would in their situation.You must think like your competitors’ decision makers, which will usually be the Group Content/Program Director or CEO but don’t rule out majority shareholders either. And station programmers will also have a voice in the room.This approach moves you into a thought process that helps turn competitive intelligence into competitive insights.Too often when a competitor launches a direct attack, a station will formulate a defence strategy after the event. In an ideal world, the defence strategy would already be prepared and ready to be implemented immediately so as to blunt the competitor’s attack.As Sun Tzu said: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”  By David Kidd, BPR […]