Prendeville drives shift to Red FM in Cork

The last set of radio ratings, courtesy of the Joint National Listenership Research (JNLR) survey, confirm a big shift has taken place in the Cork market, with Red FM gaining 4 percentage points in its market share at the expense of rival 96FM, which slid 3.8 points.

The move follows a "substantial investment" in the relaunch of the station last year, which saw presenter Neil Prendeville and his team poached from 96FM to present a mid-morning show – a defection that made waves in Cork. The station also hired Keith Cunningham, aka KC, back from Today FM to take the breakfast helm.

"The results that we saw in the last JNLR are very much a manifestation of that investment," says Diarmuid O'Leary, chief executive of Red FM, which counts members of the Crosbie family and media investor Dermot Hanrahan among its shareholders.

“We’re very focused on Cork and that can sometimes sound parochial, but from our point of view, it is about delivering a national standard at a local level,” says O’Leary.

96FM, which is owned by UTV Media and targets an older audience, is still ahead with a 21 per cent share of weekday listening in Cork compared with Red FM's 18.7 per cent. But Red FM has over the past year overtaken both RTÉ Radio 1 (which has 16.6 per cent) and UTV's other station in the county, C103 (on 14.3 per cent), to become the second-biggest station in Cork.

Rewind 12 months earlier, and 96FM was sitting on a 35.2 per cent share, while Red FM had just 8.5 per cent. This equates to the loss of 50,000 listeners at 96FM (on a listened- yesterday basis), which is now at 118,000 listeners, while Red FM’s audience has increased 43,000 to 111,000.

O'Leary, who joined Red FM in mid-2013 from his role as advertising sales director at the Irish Daily Star, describes Prendeville as "the Gerry Ryan of the south" and says "personalities of that quality don't come cheap".

Some 37,000 listeners have so far followed the headline-making presenter to Red FM, taking his slot’s audience up to 56,000, while 96FM’s mid-morning listenership has slipped to 72,000 at the last count.

The latest accounts for Red FM show that the station was loss-making before the relaunch. O’Leary says there isn’t a “straight-line equation” between revenue and audience growth, but he’s expecting revenue to grow in the short to medium-term nevertheless.

And after a Love/Hate-inspired campaign last year, Red FM will continue to invest in marketing.

“For a station aimed at under-45s, it is vital that we do,” says O’Leary.