No Rock And Roll Fun

BRANDENOMICS: We don't have any real problem with EMAP stretching their brands over various platforms - or knocking up telly services out of magazine titles - it's just the way they go about it that drives us mad. Fr'example, does Q on the telly really come across as a moving, singing version of Q magazine? To us it seems like something else - Select trying to make a mix tape for a family car journey and remembering to include something for mother TV, perhaps. It's a problem at the heart of all EMAP's cross media adventures - Smash Hits does seem to have translated well, but only because Smash Hits (the magazine) had been detoothed and a gang of men in bright yellow suits had carefully removed anything that had even the merest hint of personality about it. Now, Kerrang is about to become a proper radio brand - it's got a proper frequency rather than just living in the digital universe, which means it's going have some investment made into it.

Kerrang TV does do a pretty good job of bringing the core Kerrang values to the screen - it's noisy, it's off-putting if you're not in the clique, it's full of the sort of sexy that would arouse a paranoid virgin and anger that strikes a chord with people whose only real beef with the world is that their Mam won't let them have two Orange top-up cards a week. And it's a success. However, while the niche market works on multichannel TV, a niche of grumpy fifteen year old boys and teenage girls who've not-quite discovered The Bell Jar isn't going to support an FM radio network. Even in Birmingham.

So Kerrang has been stretched - it's no longer playing the noises of suburban outsiders, but speaking to the "little bit of rock inside most of us." You can almost hear the panic in the voice of the marketing director, Lisa Blower:

"It's important that people realise that Kerrang! 105.2 is not a niche station. Our music will be a lot broader than some people think. Just because you wear a suit by day, you're not excluded from Kerrang!'s world. Kerrang! 105.2 is about music with attitude rather than straight age demographics."

You have to feel sorry for her - she's been given a station with a strong brand attached to it, and now she's caught trying to actually explain that the station is nothing like the brand, not at all. The way they've been trying to do this is with "retuning" sessions and - oh, help me, Lord - "rock aerobics" in Warwickshire offices. The most telling quote is this:

"We have had to design a creative [campaign] which will be considered cool by the Kerrang! aficionados whilst also being exciting but unthreatening to the wider audience."

Kerrang: Unthreatening. Something's gone awry there, hasn't it?