GCap Media's flagship London station Capital Radio has revealed it will dispatch a team armed with lipsticks and thousands of innuendo-laden, hand-written notes across the city next week in its first advertising campaign in 18 months.
Britain's largest commercial radio group had held back on promotional campaigns for its London music station as it streamlined the business in the wake of a £711m merger between Capital and GWR.
However, GCap says mistakes that saw Capital lose the London top spot are now behind it and the time has come to start spending on advertising again.
The campaign launching on Monday is based round the slogan "Who's doing who?", with posters, scribbled notes, web adverts and faxes to London firms asking questions like "Is Christina doing Robbie?".
If Capital is right, consumers intrigued by the cryptic notes will tune in to hear a competition where listeners guess which artist is singing another's song.
"There's a feeling that, over the last three or four years, Capital has retreated a bit from that sort of street level activity and has become a bit remote and detached," said Steve Orchard, the operations director at GCap.
"We have to re-engage with people, literally at street level."
Capital's advertising team will scrawl the questions like "Is Lily doing Justin?" across 5,000 London pub mirrors in lipstick to push the "Who's doing who?" campaign.
The competition itself will dole out £100,000 over six weeks and features special recordings by well-known artists. Capital can't reveal who they are for fear of spoiling the competition.
The station is also keeping tight-lipped about the campaign's costs, which analysts have put at between £1m and £1.5m.
Jim Cruickshank, the GCap group marketing director likened the marketing drive to a political campaign of getting out and hand-shaking
"By its nature, this is not a multimillion TV campaign. This is much smarter use of money," he said
Mr Cruickshank said the new wave of advertising - devised by Dialogue DLKW, Rocket and PHD - is focused on clarifying Capital as a brand.
"One of the key jobs we have to do is to answer the question 'what is Capital?' - what does it do? And we are very clear on that now. Capital is a hit music station and was in the past and should be going forward on the same grounds," he said.
"That's been a clouded position over the past few years."
Mr Orchard says Capital's objective is "to go back to a clear number one position in this market" after losing top spot to Magic and also ceding market share to Heart.
He said the advertising campaign will be reflected in listener figures in the new year.
Capital's move to keep listeners and attract bigger-spending advertisers with a promise to play only two adverts in a row has dampened overall revenues at GCap.
Last week, the media group - whose shares have shed 28% so far this year to around 209p - said revenues for the six months to the end of September are expected to be down 9% on a year ago. Excluding Capital, they would be falling 4%.
Mr Orchard said the advertising market was still "extremely difficult" to call but that things were bottoming out for the media group after underperforming an already weak commercial radio market for months.
"What we are very confident about is the recovery prospects for Capital," he said.
"We believe we will put it back in the number one position and our ambition actually goes further than that. We believe it should be and will be one of the top three or four radio stations in the world."
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