WITH TWO NEW STATIONS NEARING launch, a recent spate of new hires and an application in for a license in Calgary, Evanov Radio Group is taking aim at becoming something bigger.
Its flagship is Toronto’s Z103.5, home of the music who’s female listeners wear low-riding hip-hugging jeans showing off their belly-button ring and tummy tattoo – and whose male listeners wear size 72 pants with vintage sports jerseys.
Z103.5 just posted its best ratings ever with a 4.3 share in Toronto in the Spring 2 book.
The company’s other two stations are Foxy 88.5 “Music with class” (think Sinatra and Tony Bennett and Paul Anka and Celine Dion) and AM530, the multicultural station launched over 20 years ago by Paul’s father and Evanov radio CEO Bill, one of the original CHIN Radio salesmen.
The company is about to modify and export the Z103.5 concept (rhythmic CHR with a dance edge says vice-president programming Paul Evanov) to Halifax, coincidentally, also at 103.5 MHz on the FM dial. That station should be on the air in November and staffing is under way.
After that, Ottawa’s Jewel – modeled on Foxy – will launch, hopefully before the end of 2005, says Paul.
And, as recently revealed by the CRTC, Evanov is one of nine bidding for a new commercial license in Calgary (this, too, is a Foxy/Jewel-like application).
So how hard is it to work the teen and young adult demo in a niche that most broadcasters have shied away from? How tough is it to maneuvre as a small radio fish in the country’s biggest media pond? How big does Evanov radio want to grow?
What follows is an edited transcript between www.cartt.ca’s editor and publisher Greg O’Brien and Evanov Radio’s heir-apparent, Paul Evanov (right).
Greg O’Brien: Until recently, Evanov has only been these three radio stations here in Toronto, right?
Paul Evanov: Yes, Foxy 88.5, Z103.5, and AM 530.
GOB: But you’re staffing up now for – which one’s first, Halifax or Ottawa?
PE: Halifax.
GOB: And when does that launch?
PE: It’s still TBA because we’re finalizing the construction of the new tower. CHUM’s building a new tower in Halifax and we’re going to be on there. Ballpark, we’re looking at beginning of November. But before that we’re going to do a soft launch with a standby antenna sometime in September, or early October. We’re pretty eager to get on the radio there.
GOB: So you haven’t hired any on-air staff or anything like that?
PE: No. We’ve hired a general manager/sales manager… Dan Cormier. He’s knee deep in hiring other management and staff.
GOB: And you’ve been staffing up in Toronto as well.
PE: A little bit, yeah. The company is growing overall. We had the three stations for years all run out of the operation here but the stations are growing themselves and we’re going after more licenses. We got Halifax awarded to us and Ottawa awarded to us in a very close time period.
So, right away we have to staff those two operations, but also corporately we’re going from three stations to five stations and we need to get a few more people in place. We’re never really happy or content just being. We want to keep on growing and think of ways to grow our operation in Toronto.
GOB: Are you more interested in building radio stations or would you be a buyer of radio stations or groups or anything like that?
PE: We’re broadcasters and so we want to get as many radio stations as possible. Ideally, anything that comes up that makes sense, we’ll look at it and we analyze everything. We want to acquire more stations across the country; we’ve got the east coast now, we’ve got Toronto and Ottawa. We did apply in Kamloops and got denied on that…
GOB: And there’s nine of you applying in Calgary?
PE: That’s right. Quite a few players.
We look at opportunities as they come up. If somebody wants to sell – it’s very rare. The best way to get a license is to apply for one because right now the premium on radio stations is so high so you could be paying $4 million for a radio station that serves 50,000 people on 8,000 watts.
On the other hand, when you go through the application process, once you get it, you don’t have to actually pay for it. It’s almost getting it for free, except for the hard costs of actually applying so it’s a lot more economical.
GOB: Now the Halifax station will be another Z103.5, correct?
PE: Coincidentally, it’s got the same frequency but it’s going to have its own logo and it’s going to be different: We’re going to be calling it “The New Z103, the Beat of Halifax”. The music is going to be similar – what we call rhythmic CHR with a dance edge from all the different genres, but Halifax is a different market so the music will reflect that.
GOB: Now the Ottawa station is called The Jewel – will that be more of a Foxy sound?
Not exactly like Foxy. We don’t believe that when something is working in one market like Toronto that you can just pop it into another city. It has to be local. There’s a different feel on the east coast than in Toronto and there’s a different feel in Ottawa, but it is going to be similar to Foxy 88.5 there.
GOB: Any idea when that’s going to launch?
PE: Not exactly yet… but we’re in a hurry to get both on the air.
GOB: 2006?
PE: If so, right at the beginning.
GOB: Is rhythmic CHR a tough niche to be in?
PE: A little. But we’re untraditional. There’s really no other station like us in Canada. We’re CHR one way in that we do play the hits, but we don’t play 400 hits and pound them 70 times a week over and over again, kind of like KISS 92 did in Toronto (before it went Jack).
So we play the hits, but we also have a rhythmic edge and when I say that it means we play dance music like reggae, Euro, house, trance – all kind of mixed in there. Nobody else in Canada does that. Even in the States only a few select stations do it like KTU New York.
We’re not a pop CHR where it’s very safe and mostly you’re playing pop music like the Kelly Clarksons and Green Day and the same hits on the charts that are spit out 60 times a week.
It’s a rhythmic CHR so when we play those hits, we also mix some other stuff in there for variety, which makes us different. The Toronto market – most other markets in Canada – are so stagnant, everybody is so cookie-cutter… and everybody is very safe.
GOB: Well, the format that’s newest are BOB and Jack FM, but they’re not really about new music are they?
PE: And that’s the one thing we like doing. We play a lot of hits, but we get to play new music and try out new artists so…
GOB: And that paid off pretty well in the last ratings book, too.
PE: With Z103 we just keep going up and up. We’re at a 4.3 share – our highest share ever. We’ve consistently gone up over the past five or six books, not only in cume but also in share. So, it’s working.
GOB: I’ve heard some people criticizing the book for being a summer book with little meaning, but the ratings period ended June 26th, just when school got out, so it’s not a summer book.
PE: You’re going to find that argument from (stations) that go down and don’t have a good book – it always works that way. But bottom line, Spring 2 was all of May and all of June, school’s in and people are filling out those diaries. Yes, it’s close to summer and the weather is getting nicer but all those people still listen to us. We went up, so more people are listening to us now than before and are listening to us longer because our share went up.
And for some of our competitors, like Flow, they went down. They’re going to use that argument, but all the same people got the diaries…
GOB: In your market do you consider FLOW to be the only direct competitor?
PE: No. Edge 102 as well. Edge, FLOW and us, we always flip flop for teens 12 to 17, but we compete basically from 12 to 34 in a broad sense. Since nobody really targets teens it’s the 18 to 34 demographic we’re fighting every day for.
What we found in this book is that some listeners are saying that because of the music, we are the only game in town.
GOB: How concerned are you with the prevailing conventional wisdom that young people are tuning radio out and instead turning to their iPods or whatever. Since Z103.5 targets that market, how much of a problem is this?
PE: Some of the reason has to do with technology. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that they’re teens and radio hasn’t embraced them. They haven’t grown up with a radio station because most radio stations in Canada have ignored them. And, if you ignore somebody long enough, they’re going to go to a different outlet – and that outlet is easier now with iPods and computers and downloading.
Let’s use Halifax as a case in point. No station there targets anyone under 34 years old. We did our market research and found that they needed a youth station. The only one that’s even close is C100 because nobody markets that or steers close to that demographic. With all of the consolidation over the past couple of years with all the same companies owning everything – look at Calgary where the five major guys are in there and that’s really it.
Traditionally, most of the money is in 25 to 54 females so if you look at the stations across Canada, most of them program towards that demographic. In Halifax there’s no doubt we’ll be two or three in the market in the first year, guaranteed, and then probably pretty close to number one if not number one in two years.
We feel that confident because we’re servicing a demographic that’s been ignored over the past few years. We didn’t apply for a certain format, per se, but for a youth license that will service those from 12 to 24. So the format might change where urban is popular right now – that could switch to alternative rock so we’ll be able to respond, whatever’s hot at the time, whatever they want – we’ll change.
GOB: You’re in on the satellite radio decision appeal with CHUM and the rest. Do you feel that the markets you serve are at threat because of the satellite radio licenses or is this strictly a Canadian content complaint?
PE: It’s a bit of both. It’s another service coming in so that’s obviously a threat. It’s not going to help us. It’s not going to help stations.
But, the problem is that it’s not the same playing field. When other stations start up, everyone is on the same playing field. You get a tower, you have to play x-amount of Canadian music – same as everyone else. With satellite radio, when you’re driving into work, you punch into satellite radio and you don’t have to tune to a radio station and hear 35% Cancon.
GOB: What are the overall goals for Evanov radio? How big do you want to get?
PE: Sky’s the limit. We want to grow and part of the reason we do is we need to be able to compete in Canada in this ongoing, competitive radio market – and not only in Toronto, but all across Canada. In the future the companies with one or two stations – will find it difficult to compete with companies with 40 or 50 stations across the country.
The more we can do and have our voice in different markets – it’s exciting.
