The AdTonos team had a fantastic time at RadioDays Europe 2022 in Malmö, Sweden! We just couldn’t wait to meet old friends and explore the exhibitions, so as soon as we arrived in Malmö (just a convenient train ride away from Copenhagen), we eagerly rushed to our hotel rooms and headed straight for the conference venue. Our stand was beautiful, and we were pleased to see that the event would be taking place in such a great venue.

Highlights from RadioDays Europe 2022 in Malmö

It was a wonderful trip, and it was good to see people in person after so long. We all got to reunite with old friends and past colleagues in the radio industry, and got to learn about other speakers on a more personal level before they delivered their talks, which was wonderful. The venue was beautiful and easily accessible – and the food was great. We had the privilege of making new connections with so many people from the Czech Republic to France and beyond, and were especially starstruck when we met the President of the Association of European Radios, Stefan Möller in his iconic bow tie!

It was a pleasure to have Roger Cutsforth – founder of White Label Studio – join us as a guest and co-speaker for Paul Cranwell’s (our VP of Strategic Partnerships) presentation. Roger is such a lovely person, with so much experience and knowledge in audio and radio. The AdTonos team had amazing, insightful conversations with Roger, and all who met him only have positive things to say about him.

Of all the speakers at the event, the AdTonos team especially found Hits Radio’s Stephanie Hirst, Bounce’s Nik Goodman and Virgin Radio’s Ben Jones to be brilliant, delivering key insights into the world of radio and noteworthy trends in the industry. “The Power of Radio – many voices, one message,” delivered by Mark Cunning, Lucy Barrett & George Butler was a powerful presentation that championed the value of collaboration, unity and finding common ground. It was amazing to hear about #mentalhealthminute as a vehicle for good in radio.

It is nice to see organisations making mental health more of a priority, treating it with more importance. Mental health needs to be acknowledged and meaningfully engaged with much more than is currently the case, particularly in the fields of marketing and advertising.

Of course, we’d be remiss to not include Paul Cranwell and Roger Cutsforth’s talk as one of our event highlights! You can watch the video of Paul’s talk here.

Paul Cranwell’s and Roger Cutsforth’s Presentation

“I’ve been in radio for thirty years and what I’ve seen recently is a lot of fear” says Paul Cranwell. Radio professionals needn’t be nervous of the digital age; there’s a lot of new opportunities that radio stations can use to make money including programmatic advertising and interactivity.”

Paul also made use of compelling statistics in his presentation. For example, did you know that there are 1000 voice activated apps in the new Audi? Some additional takeaways include:

Radio stations should have their own apps in order to…

  • Leverage first party data to the maximum
  • Get better audience engagement, which makes it more likely that audiences willingly share their data
  • Create libraries of podcasts and sponsorship opportunities
  • Integrate E-Commerce platforms in-app where branded merchandise can be sold
  • Unlock interactive engagement opportunities e.g., through smart speakers and on mobile devices
  • To be able to benefit from audiences on social media through live audio rooms and similar new channels

Paul also urged audiences to ‘think mobile first’, as mobile digital audio is a $4 billion enterprise; not investing in mobile means losing out on money as well as a large potential audience.

Roger Cutsforth spoke very frankly about the need to “make it easy for us to buy radio… At the moment, it’s too hard.” He provided an insight into what agencies desperately need from publishers; agencies would benefit from entirely digitised, independent ad exchanges that ‘sell’ less and instead help them buy ads.

Audience Feedback from Paul Cranwells’ and Roger Cutsforth’s Presentation

The feedback for this talk was overwhelmingly positive. The list of what radio stations should do to be more successful in particular was what audience members responded best to and found most helpful, with several social media posts attesting to just how informative and engaging the talk was.

Paul and Roger received very good questions, for example from Daniel Karlsson from Triton Digital, and the speakers were praised for their no-nonsense, refreshing approach to the discussion.

Summarising his time at RadioDays Europe, Paul said:

Many thanks to Daniel Karlsson from Triton Digital, our partner, who once again, drove an engaging discussion during the Q&A segment of the presentation. Daniel asked one of the more challenging questions during our presentation, so we definitely had our work cut out for us (thanks Daniel!!!). Good to know our partners have our best interests at heart… On a more serious note, I was very glad he asked such a brilliant, well thought out question to get the flow of discussion going.

Roger added:

I’ve had the privilege over the last few days to be in Sweden to attend Radiodays Europe thanks to the wonderful team AdTonos. It’s been great to see many friends and make new ones especially; Michal Marcinik, Katarzyna Bargielska, Nida El Amraoui, Oliwia Bukała and my old mucker Paul Cranwell – thank you for making me feel so welcome.