The brief
Original 106 FM was failing – both in terms of audience numbers and advertising revenue. We’d been in discussions with the owners, Tomahawk Radio for a number of months about doing something radical with the format. So it was an exciting day when Richard Johnson of Tomahawk got in touch to tell us that they were going to ‘flip the format’ and needed a big PR stunt to publicise the fact.
Flipping the format
Traditionally in the UK, new radio stations are launched by telling people about it through expensive traditional media, but in the US they have something known as flipping the format. You can go to bed listening to Smooth FM one night and when you wake up it’s become a heavy metal station. So the brief was to take the 'flip' and create some form of stunt that would see the demise of Original, and the launch of Jack.
Original gets Jack’d
The Jack franchise is huge in the States and is deliberately irreverent and off the wall. So a station hijack was bang on brand. We shot a hijack film of an infamous (and anonymous) local newspaper columnist who goes by the pseudonym of Mike Ford and the Original FM DJ Jed Pitman prior to launch, both men improvising from a script structure we prepared in advance. The film was then edited and made ready to stream as live on the morning.
From 8.00am on launch day, the two men appeared to argue and insult each other until the DJ stormed out. On air, Ford then continued to broadcast on Original, claiming "a monkey" could be a radio presenter. As the message boards on thisisbristol began to fill up with comments, so Mike Ford was taken off air, and a holding message from Original FM was broadcast, asking people to bear with the management, as they attempted to regain control of their radio station. Even though off air, Mike Ford continued to dominate the message boards of thisisbristol, and he also continued to post on social media networks. At 6.00am the following day, Jack FM went live on the old Original FM 106.5 frequency and the stunt was revealed to be a launch stunt for the new radio station.
Listen up
At launch, the hijack video soon became the most watched on thisisbristol.co.uk
More results to go here, when I dig them out of my old files!
“We wanted the launch of Jack to be not just noticed, but newsworthy. To really kickstart the process of raising awareness of Jack FM. What impressed us most about the guys at G&V was the way that they not only had an idea to make that happen, but also the media contact book to ensure that it could, and then the skills to write, shoot and spread the event across social media.”
Richard Johnson, Chief Creative Officer
It’s in the numbers
Since launch Jack FM Bristol has been a star performer in local radio seeing a 385% audience increase in 12 months.
The station is now at 102,000 listeners, 17% of the TSA (Total Survey Area) compared with just 21,000 (4%) before the rebrand from Original 106 FM.