Ahmedabad air waves beckon AirCheck India

With private radio stations bagging four licences for Ahmedabad, AirCheck India, the audio content monitoring service provider for radio has decided to enter the city.

The company will extend its broadcast monitoring and analysis of commercial and song air play to Ahmedabad. Presently, the city has three stations.

Aircheck India is present in seven cities and is subscribed to by 46 radio stations across Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Jaipur since its launch in India around 2003.

In the next phase, the company is looking at Kanpur and Pune which have acquired three and four radio licences respectively.

AirCheck records content broadcast on all channels through its servers at Mumbai, titles the information and stores it in its database which is available to subscribers online.

It also produces independent verification of airplay on the same-day along with other services like live reports, market share, brand and category analysis, exception reports, song rotations preferred by radio stations, among others.

"For a radio station, the most critical factor before launch and even while it is on-air is to understand its audience. Typically, listeners' choice in Category A cities like Mumbai, Delhi and even Ahmedabad are quite different from Category B cities. Based on a monitoring device, a radio station can know any day, at any time which song or commercial was played, how many times it was played, for example, things that would help understand the competition better, " said Kanan Bhuta, manager-sales and Airways Support RCS (India) which markets AirCheck.

According to figures provided by TAM Media Research in May 2007, the total contribution of advertisements from radio is 3 per cent in India and should double in the next three years.

In terms of number of brands opting for radio advertising in the first quarter of 2007, Delhi led the way with 598, Mumbai had 527, there were 441 brands advertising in radio in Chennai, 418 in Bangalore, 410 in Kolkata, 304 in Hyderabad and 266 in Jaipur.

Currently, Radio Mirchi, Radio City, Big FM, HT Virgin, Radio One, Radio Indigo and Red FM have subscribed to AirCheck for their stations across the country.