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MUMBAI: The only FM radio station in the country targeting women, Meow 104.8 FM now plans to extend the brand to Mumbai, Kolkata and even the smaller towns it has acquired licenses for.
Encouraged by the number of callers, text messages and responses to contests, Radio Today COO Anil Srivatsa is ready to try a similar experiment in Mumbai, where the station launches next, by August. In fact, the ploy – targeting the female listener, could even work in the smaller cities like Shimla, Patiala, Amritsar and Jodhpur where Radio Today has bagged the licenses to start a FM radio station. “The talk format we use can be universally applied,” says Srivatsa, who says women formed a large chunk of his listenership when he ran the popular Anil Ki Awaaz radio station in the US for a decade before returning to India. While acknowledging that targeting the female populace was a risky proposition, Srivatsa says it would have been far more risky to have started business as a me-too in a metropolis cluttered with similar sounding stations.
All it will take for the Meow brand to be successful even in mini metros is a bit of content tweaking to make it relevant to the region, says the radio/TV veteran. Meow FM has not only opted for the `different` route by targeting women, it has also opted for the `talk` format, restricting the use of music on its shows. The music content on Meow shows varies from five to 10 per cent, only going up to 40 per cent on certain shows, much of it is a combination of retro Hindi (In the day) and English (at nights) music. According to Srivatsa, this differentiation has helped the station break through the clutter of similar sounding stations in the capital, and also means that the station pays lesser for the royalties on the music played. “At least, we are not being held to ransom like others on that front,” quips Srivatsa.
However, Srivatsa is still looking for the right radio hosts/presenter candidates to man his Delhi station, and the upcoming ones in Mumbai and Kolkata. “I am still looking for the right people, who have a good world view and life experience, although they may not have the requisite radio experience,” he says. The Delhi station is still looking to fill its complement of nine radio jockeys. Srivatsa himself hosts a show, MEOW Between The Sheets, which addresses a host of issues that women listeners have been tuning into, thanks to the advantage of anonymous interaction it offers.
Next on the priority list of the Radio Today floated FM station is an interactive website that should get activated within the next three months, and which will harness the interactive power of the Internet to integrate listeners.
