By Dean Landsman
September, 1995

There is a new kind of station starting to bloom on radio dials in America's major markets. What makes it new? Well, it could care less about Arbitron ratings, for one thing. In fact, it doesn't even care what's happening elsewhere on the radio dial.

It's called Bloomberg Business Radio, and it is additional to radio as we know it: a cutting edge strategy that is unconfined by traditional radio assumptions.

To see how far Bloomberg goes "outside the box" of radio-as-usual, let's look at what's in that box —

• Every market has a limited pie of advertising revenues, listeners, and time spent listening to radio
• Stations should create formats that capture and hold certain percentage slices of a market's demographic and listening-share pies
• No station can sell advertising without obtaining a significant share of a market's listening time

Bloombuerg stations look outside that box to a group too narrow to interest any of the mass market stations, but rich enough to interest advertisers: business people in a hurry. The product is what this audience wants and needs: pure information, business information, around the clock, right now. The station can be listened to repeatedly in short doses, and rarely for longer periods of time. While this approach may bring to mind the all-news model, it is a different animal entirely.

BBR lacks the ambitions of all-news radio, which is targeted to a mass market. BBR also lacks the costs of news radio, which tend to be higher than other kinds of radio formats. BBR's is a simple information delivery mechanism; nothing more or less. And it gets the job done very efficiently. Advertisers get what they want, and keep coming back.

Arbitron ratings are also irrelevant to BBR, since they don't address BBR's audience.

In fact, BBR has no direct competition. One might say its competition includes ALL information media that are supported by advertising: billboards, video crawlboards, whatever.

This outside-the-box position puts BBR in play/play role, rather than the win/lose role required by radio-as-usual, with its finite audience and revenue pies.

If you are in the New York or Boston areas, check out Bloomberg Business Radio on one of the service's flagship stations:

• WBBR Business Radio 1130AM New York
• WBNW Business 590AM Boston

Or check for the service on the complete list of Bloomberg affiliate stations.

Or if you want to hear the service right now, press this button to hear Bloomberg Business Radio live via RealAudio

Finally, if you want to visit any of Bloomberg's many information fountains, start at the Bloomberg Home Page.