Course, which is a full time Radio Jockeying course. And then we are running a threemonth sales & marketing course, especially for Radio. Your website says, “Simran kisi ko bhi RJ bana sakti hai”, is that true? That’s our marketing tagline! We give 100% job guarantee. It’s not job placement or assistance. It’s 100% job guarantee or 50% money back. Now there is a catch, there is always a catch. And the catch is the percentage of marks in internals, the percentage of marks in your finals and your attendance in the academy. When students come to us, they think they’ll have a nice time. And we have students coming from all kinds of places and saying they want to get out of their homes, because their parents have made their lives miserable. They see it as an escape, as a course of just one year duration, so lets do it! But once they start with the course they feel this is like back to school. For us it is important to churn out good talent, because it is our reputation, which is at stake. So we don’t mind saying 100% job guarantee. You give us what we want and we will give you what you want, otherwise it won’t work! The radio market is growing and there will be a demand for more talent, do you think the radio industry, in terms of institutes is also set to grow by leaps and bounds? Well, you can compare it to the airline sector. Ten years ago when airlines were privatized, nobody had heard of air hostess
On air: Simran Kohli
training institutes. And today, I read about a new institute being opened, every month. And there are still more needed as there are still more airlines waiting to come up. Radio share in the advertising pie has really gone up. No other industry has grown at the rate at which radio has grown. We are looking at an 8 to 9 per cent share by 2009 from the current rate of 2-3 percent, which is huge! Can you imagine what will happen by then? More and more brands are coming in. Who wouldn’t want to reach the villages, the interiors of the villages? 75% of the population is in the villages and those are the real consumers. And who is reaching them – Radio!!! Does ARM also create content for voice over and jingles, etc? For the time being, we don’t. We would like to do this as and when it happens in the private FM stations, once they start inviting programming from outside. But that is the way
We consider ourselves the pioneers in South Asia and this is only the beginning ahead. It wouldn’t make sense for a Radio City, which would have some 200 radio stations by the end of two years to provide 100% staff everywhere, do 100% programming. So syndication is the next step, like in television channels. We are looking at that also. We are also looking at our own community radio station, because we have all the facilities. Once we have that we will create our own content. www.arm.net.in
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November 2007 | Radio Duniya