I love working on projects that raise the game in innovation so I couldn’t be prouder of the online team’s contribution to Primedia’s groundbreaking coverage of the Oscar Pistorius trial, #OscarExtra, an online pop-up radio station running for the duration of the trial.
The idea came to us a way to run trial audio within all 4 of our station’s radio station apps and thanks to our team’s creative powers it quickly turned into an amazing full-service 12hr radio station. Sounds simple right? You optimize on the biggest media event of the year by providing dedicated coverage without cannibalizing on your regular radio programming, well yes… and no.
The operation of a live feed from the courtroom, a board operator, and a great radio presenter who did call-ins and commentary was pretty standard by radio standards and the online side of setting up a dedicated stream and quick turn around podcasts was one we already had waxed. However, convincing all the station heads that it was better to do this cool groundbreaking content thing online only turned out to be the most challenging task of all.
You have to understand this in an environment where podcasts are still relatively new to our audience it looked like this massive risk…
It’s a good thing I’m charming because our ‘launch it now and apologise later’ strategy… well, it could have gone sideways. But it didn’t because as it turned out radio listeners like to listen to things online too, especially when at work and the internet is easily accessible. Oscar Extra was one of our most popular online projects of the year with streams surpassing any of the numbers we had ever done in online audio before!
It was also really exciting to see the attention it got from the industry who thought it was groundbreaking too.
UPDATE: #OscarExtra nominated for Bookmarks in the Integrated Multi-platform campaign category
I love it when a calculated risk pays off!
khwezi magwaza 