This week’s egtabite features an award-winning and highly effective marketing campaign by the French speaking radio station Nostalgie, which took Gold at the 2015 Effie Awards Belgium. By developing a multi-faceted and consistent marketing approach, Nostalgie successfully gained audience share from its rivals and refreshed the station’s brand image, without having to increase its marketing budget or change its musical programme.
In the ears of the beholder
 Nostalgie, as its name suggests, is a music radio targeted at adults, with programming centred on hits from the 70s 80s and 90s. The station competes with the public broadcaster’s Classic21 and to some extent private Radio Contact for listeners in the 35-45 demographic. All three stations have similar audience share.
However, Nostalgie has the oldest audience profile of the three, with 37% of its listeners aged 55 or over. By the end of 2013, Classic21 had overtaken Nostalgie in the 35-45 demo, and it was crucial to win back some of these listeners to stop the station aging along with its audience.
 Objectives: audience share and positioning
Nostalgie’s marketing efforts in 2014 were geared towards winning listeners in its core target demographic, increasing audience loyalty and improving its brand perception. Rather than being seen as a station for senior citizens playing a heavy rotation of old fashioned songs, Nostalgie wanted to position itself as a a first choice station, and one that its listeners took to their hearts and were proud to identify with.
The station’s marketing team knew that its core target audience often listens to Nostalgie without really being aware of the brand, but these people cannot resist singing along to their favourite songs. And it was this insight that became the key concept of the new campaign.
 Creative and media strategies: built on an uncontrollable desire to sing (and to listen to Nostalgie!)
Nostalgie launched a contagious and participatory marketing campaign designed to tap into its listeners’ love of singing, using fragments of French and English songs laced together to make mini stories. Knowing that people who saw or heard parts of the campaign would inevitably start singing, the marketing team hoped to leave lasting traces in each listener’s memory, strengthening the emotional bond between them and the radio station.
Nostalgie made sure that its presence was felt continuously from April to December 2014, with 32 different stories across print, television, cinemas, online, in social media and out on the street. The campaign was designed to be both consistent and flexible, allowing the creative to be adapted very quickly to reference any relevant subject – from big calendar moments, for example Christmas, Valentine’s Day or Mother’s/Father's Day, to more unusual issues, such as the national elections or Movember.
Great results, objectives achieved
 Without changing its musical schedule, and using the same creative and media budgets as in 2013, Nostalgie was able to:
- Gain 1.5% audience share over two waves of measurement reporting
- Achieve a record high audience of 896,698, including 69,475 new listeners
- Renew its audience and prevent the station from aging
- Make the strongest recruitment in the 35-45 demo (30,583 listeners per week), outperforming its competitors
- Increase its number of fans and make Nostalgie the station of choice for more listeners
- Become more attractive to advertisers, with an increase in average listening from 171 to 181 minutes among 35-45 year-olds
egta asked Kim Beyns, Marketing director, NRJ, Nostalgie & Chérie FM Belgium, for his reflection on this campaign: "The briefing I gave to our agency (Silver&Copper) was not an easy one: we had to reach our objectives with a diversified campaign, which also had to be innovative, modern and that would give us the possibility to be very reactive. All that, while respecting a very limited budget for production costs. The results we got thanks to this campaign have exceeded all my expectations.”
Why this matters for egta members
Getting into the minds of listeners and connecting with them in a fun and engaging way allows B2C radio campaigns to become more effective ... without the need for additional budgets. Nostalgie found a way to build a campaign that combined consistency of message with flexibility and adaptability, developing relevant touchpoints across a range of media and other marketing opportunities. By growing its audience share, Nostalgie also increased its visibility and attention to advertisers. The results of the campaign speak for themselves.
 egta will showcase great B2B and B2C cases at its Radio Marketing & Sales Meeting in Hamburg on 1 December 2015. We hope to see you there ... or even better, hear about your own successes!
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