Talk the talk

Kieran McGeary, chief executive of south-east regional music station Beat 102 103, talks to David Clerkin.

The station celebrated its first birthday last week. How was the first year in business?

It’s been a fantastic year in many different ways. Beat is the first regional (as opposed to county-based) station in the country. There was a lot of scepticism as to whether it would work. We’ve a very reasonable audience built up. We exceeded our expectations after six months and in terms of revenue, we’ve reached our year one target.

What are you doing right?

The main thing was we did our sums before we went on air. We researched the market very well and identified a gap. We listened to people in the region and implemented a plan based on what we heard.

What do advertisers and listeners think?

The definitive guide is the JNLR listenership survey. After six months, we had 58,000 listeners. We’re joint market leaders in the region with 2FM and we’re ahead of Today FM. Advertisers have liked us. We’re a new concept and allow them to buy a region, rather than a county or national audience. We’re also extremely well targeted at the 15-34 group. We’ve had very good support from national and local advertisers from day one.

How much of an advantage is it to be able to specifically target the 15-34 age group?

Being all things to all people is incredibly difficult. People want to be able to get exactly what they want. Other products, like food and even newspapers, are targeted at specific groups - it makes sense that radio should be the same. When I’m listening to the radio, I don’t want to be pigeonholed and told I can only hear the music I want at a certain time.

Can Beat’s model be repeated in other parts of the country?

We’ve been the first to operate on a regional basis and have been successful. We’ve made it out of the starting blocks and we’re doing something right. With the skills and knowledge we have after doing this once, we’d look at any opportunities that come up. There’s likely to be a second regional station, in the west, in future and we’d be very interested in that.

Tell me about your own background please.

I’m from Waterford originally and started in radio at 15 in WLR (Waterford’s local radio station and a shareholder in Beat). After school I went to college in England and studied communications and broadcast journalism. I worked for local BBC stations and took my first management position as head of news in two commercial stations. I went on to work as programme director with a station in Wolverhampton before coming back to set up Beat.

Where do you see Beat a year from now?

We predict we should be at break even after 18 months to two years in business. Our other challenge is to maintain and grow our audience. But there’s intense competition out there and we can’t afford to be complacent. We’ve got to work at it all the time.