The listeners talk with

Radio Radiopower.ch launches its own Spot Award in March. The private radio industry is organizing a radio spot award as part of the Radiopower.ch interest group (WW 30/04). It is now certain that the event, entitled Spot Award, will be held for the first time on March 3, 2005 in Zurich. As only broadcast spots will be awarded, the radio pools are invited to nominate spots from campaigns. A Radiopower.ch project group will select 30 to 40 spots and present them to a ten-member jury of experts from the fields of creation, production, media, customers and programming. At the same time, the radio audience is involved: Interested parties receive the access code to a website where they can listen to and judge the spots. "The plan is to give the audience's opinion twice as much weight as that of the expert jury," says Roland Baumgartner from Radiopower.ch. In 2005, the Spot Award will be limited to German-speaking Switzerland; it may later be extended to other language regions with separate events.
Until last year, radio stations had taken part in the Golden Ear awards, but this year the award has been redesigned to explicitly exclude private radio stations. On November 4, the event took place without broadcasters and marketers.
(mk)