Our children’s radio station Fun Kids has been nominated as Radio Station of the Year at two prestigious radio awards ceremonies.

At the Sony Radio Academy Awards it’s been nominated for Station of the Year (1m plus), up against BBC Radio Newcastle and Metro Radio and in the Arqiva Commercial Radio Awards it’s been nominated in Station of the Year (2m plus), up against Absolute Radio and LBC97.3.

Fun Kids is a radio station that targets the tween audience alongside programmes for younger children. It broadcasts on DAB Digital Radio in London as well as online at funkidslive.com and through mobile apps.

It’s been a busy year for the station with new commercial and programming partnerships with Disney, Camp Bestival, British Gas, Swapit, Bin Weevils, DC Thompson and Random House.

Station Manager Matt Deegan: “It’s brilliant for Fun Kids to be recognised alongside some of the biggest and most successful stations in the country. To have Best Station nominations in the big two radio awards ceremonies is a massive achievement for the Fun Kids team.”

In the Arqiva Awards the station was also nominated in the Social Action category for its Fun Kids Education work.

The multiplex is a joint venture between Town & Country Broadcasting, Dee 106.3 and UTV Media and will initially broadcast six radio stations to over 2million people across Wrexham, Chester and Liverpool from three transmitters at Moel-y-Parc, Wrexham Rhos and St. John’s Beacon.

The launch is the first of nine multiplexes that MuxCo has been awarded. It kicks of a busy 2013 for the Folder team as they intend to launch multiplexes for Gloucestershire, Hereford and Worcester, Mid and West Wales and Surrey before the end of the year.

You can find out more about MuxCo at www.muxco.com.

Fun Kids, Folder Media’s children’s radio station, has today (16th February) released their own version of One Direction’s Kiss You music video.

The video idea came from a discussion between weekend presenters Josh and Hannah about whether it would be possible to duplicate the video of the boyband’s recent hit. Josh took up the challenge and rounded up fellow weekend presenters Hannah, Sean and Jamie to join him in making the video.

All this week, Fun Kids listeners have been hearing about how the production of the video’s been going and it was announced this afternoon that listeners could now watch it on YouTube and the Fun Kids website – http://www.funkidslive.com.

Station Manager, Matt Deegan says: “It’s always fun to hook listeners with an evolving story. This was a great opportunity for presenters to appear in different dayparts of the radio station and introduce themselves to new listeners.

Matt continues “We’re also always keen to tell new people about Fun Kids and we hope the video is shared by young 1D fans who’ll get to learn about Fun Kids and that we love them as much they do”.

As well as the main video, the Fun Kids website has a full behind the scenes section with photo gallery, making of video and information about all the presenters who took part.

The video was produced and edited with Fun Kids’ production partner Create.

To coincide with the London 2012 Olympics, Converse put on 9 gigs featuring 45 bands, with each night seeing the bands ‘Represent’ for their genre. Acts included Blur, Paul Weller, Plan B and many more.

Our brief for this project was to “Bring awareness of the Converse Represent gigs to a wider audience and capture an essence of them for that audience” and “get more people to listen to the live stream and consume content (photos/video etc) from the gig”.

For this project we devised an intensive airtime and social media campaign which saw daily reports from backstage, band interview podcasts and presenter endorsements across NME Radio and in online spaces. The activity culminated in a two hour review show available on-air and on-demand.

For this project we wanted a presenter with a strong track record in new music. We chose Dan O’Connell. Dan had just finished a successful run as XFM’s afternoon show host, broadcasting across London every weekday. He has also been presenting Launched at Red Bull Studios on Channel 4.

Using band interviews, backstage insights, crowd reaction and reportage, each day Dan fronted a one minute airtime feature:

and a three minute report which appeared in Michelle Owen’s evening show on NME Radio.

Finally we produced stand alone podcasts of the full band interviews and secured front page placement on iTunes

Find our more about Folder Media Productions here.

Folder Media acquired Fun Kids (then Fun Radio) from Global Radio and Hit Entertainment in 2009, since then the station has developed into a multi-media children’s brand.

The core of Fun Kids is a radio station broadcasting on DAB Digital Radio in London and online for children under ten and their families. Over 100,000 kids and 50,000 adults tune into the station in the week. However, from it’s broadcast beginnings, Fun Kids has grown into a brand with a selection of inter-linked products.

Website

Funkidslive.com is the brand’s online home, with information about the station, the ability to listen live as well as news and content for our audience.

The website generates over 125,000 pageviews per month

Newsletter

Fun Kids talked to over 15,000 families each week through a targeted weekly newsletter. Combining editorial and commercial messaging, the newsletter is a great way to engage with parents.

Podcasting

Fun Kids is a featured partner of the iTunes Store and produces over 60 free podcast channels. Channels vary from station features to branded activity with characters like Dennis & Gnasher and from video interviews with stars like The Muppets to bespoke commercial activity.

Over 250,000 podcast episodes are downloaded from Fun Kids each month. Visit Fun Kids at iTunes.

Apps

This year the station is embarking on aggressive push into mobile apps. It’s signature app is a free iPad app that allows users to listen to the station, its podcasts, read the latest news, enter competitions and play games based on Fun Kids characters.

Download the Fun Kids iPad App

Video

Fun Kids produces both editorial and commercial video for our children’s audience. Talked about on air, the videos live in iTunes, on YouTube and online at funkidslive.com.

We have over 80,000 video views a month. Visit Fun Kids on YouTube.

The Folder team are responsible for commercial activity on Fun Kids and NME Radio. Though both radio stations are quite different, the audiences are potentially complementary.

Fun Kids audience is segmented into infants and pre-school and then junior school children. NME’s audience is split 50/50 between teenagers and young adults together they reach large numbers of young people.

As well as broadcasting to them on the radio, the stations connect with listeners online through two dedicated websites (funkidslive.com and nmeradio.com), through podcasts, video, email marketing and social networks.

To talk about available opportunities, speak to Joe Friel – joe@foldermedia.co.uk.

Fun Kids, the children’s radio station, has today (14th August) launched a fully featured free iPad app.

The space-themed app allows children and parents to listen to Fun Kids Radio and audio content from its 50 different podcast channels. Users can also access a magazine-style section with news, videos, book reviews and events information, get in touch with the station and enter the station’s different competitions each week.

The app also includes an online game, supported by the Wellcome Trust, based on the station’s Professor Hallux character. The game’s designed to demystify going to the Doctors’ with kids having to complete different levels of a Pairs game whilst finding out about different aspects of medicine.

Like the other features, the Professor Hallux game occupies its own planet in the app – a feature that Fun Kids will be making available to other commercial partners.

Matt Deegan, Station Manager of Fun Kids says: “Much of Fun Kids’ growth over the past year has come from its development into a true multi-platform brand. Our listeners and partners already connect to us through our radio output as well as our website, newsletters, Radioplayer and our podcasts. The iPad app will be great for listeners old and new, as well as providing a new way for our partners to reach children and families”.

The App was developed by Surrey-based Big Orange Software alongside Folder’s in-house development team.

The app can be downloaded for free here: http://bit.ly/funkidsipad

The app was developed by the team at Folder Media and makes it easy to listen to UK Radio from within Facebook, share your favourite stations and programmes with your friends via your wall, and see what other people in your area have been listening to.

There are now more than 250 stations in Radioplayer, many with a considerable presence on Facebook via fan pages and group pages, and they will be invited to promote and embrace the new Facebook Radioplayer app.
Michael Hill, Managing Director of Radioplayer commented: “Less than 6 months ago, we put ‘UK Radio in one place’ on your computer. Now we’re showing 30m UK Facebook users that radio is a perfect companion, while you’re chatting with friends”.

Andrew Harrison, Chairman of Radioplayer added: “These latest developments are part of a long-term strategy which will see Radioplayer form a vital component of the radio industry’s multiplatform future alongside DAB and FM.”

The app combines the data Radioplayer collects from radio stations, additional information from Media UK and mixes this with Facebook’s social graph to create a personalised radio app for all Facebook users.

The BBC and RadioCentre have been working together to create a single online radio player for all Ofcom-licensed radio stations. The idea is that stations players’ will share a similar look and feel, have common functionality and allow users to switch between stations through presets or a comprehensive search engine. If your a licensed station, there’s then only a small fee payable to RadioPlayer to to get on based on the size of your TSA.

Today at the Radio Festival in Manchester, the Managing Director of RadioPlayer demoed the new system to delegates – you can see it below. The aim is to provide a player that encourages online listening, makes it easier for listeners and creates a great online radio experience. The infrastructure for the system is now in place and some big radio stations have committed to ensuring when people press ‘Listen Live’ it will better reflect their brand and be a great listen.

The first key partners – Global Radio, BBC and GMG – working with the RadioPlayer team have created a way to collect data from radio stations – station, now playing and schedule information – as well as designing interesting web-style content for the player window.

At Folder, we think RadioPlayer’s going to be a game-changer and it’s going to be driven by the user. The online radio experience for most stations is quite poor, it’s confusing and everyone does something different. The current on-line listening share is surprisingly small – there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be higher.

However, what the big radio groups have been doing is sorting out their now playing data, making sure the schedule is up to date and integrating on-demand and listen-again. The stations that do well in RadioPlayer are the ones that look good and have good searchable data.

RadioPlayer’s potential for smaller stations is huge. Search and presets will allow smaller stations to be findable and returned to more often. However to do this small stations need the tools to punch above their weight and deliver on the promise.

Today, Folder Media and All in Media are announcing that we’re going to provide some free tools to update stations metadata. We’ll hook up your playout system, give you access to update your schedule through the web and provide a player window that’s attractive –and we’ll do it for free.

It will give any station that’s able to be part of RadioPlayer the ability to compete with the big boys. Once you get going and we start seeing how listeners are using it, we can then also help you to enhance the service and generate revenue for you station.

To register your interest, email radioplayer@foldermedia.co.uk and we’ll be in touch. And anyway, what have you got to lose – it’s a free offer!

Folder Media has recently completed the first phase of the new website for NME Radio.

Many small and digital-only radio stations’ suffer from a lack of resource to keep sites up to date and provide a content rich environment for users to enjoy. We use a variety of technology to combine station-created editorial with data from RadioBase to provide compelling experiences.

On the NME Radio site each mention of a station artist links to an ‘artist page’ which includes discography, popular songs from the station, biographies, images, latest tour dates and videos pulled from YouTube. Discographies provide tracklistings and YouTube videos are automatically embedded in the site – all helping sites generate more page impressions per user. This content is pulled from RadioBase automatically, so all a station has to to do is play a song from a new band and the page is auto-created without any intervention from station or Folder Media staff.

The station also generates revenue from these pages with commissions paid on ticket sales and music purchase or download. Additionally there are comment boxes on each pages that lets user leave their opinions on artists, tracks or videos and also allows them to post these comments to their Facebook profile, promoting the site to that user’s friends.

As well as on the artist pages, the site has a section for Gigs and Tickets. Again, pulling on RadioBase data, this is auto-generated and allows users to find and book tickets for thousands of events across the country – all with the ability to link to ticketing companies affiliate programmes. The events system allows stations to mark featured events (or venues) and promote these across the site. This is perect for sponsored activity or just events that the station knows will be popular with listeners.

The site also has Folder’s database mangement system – FolderID – built in and ready to launch in the next couple of weeks. This is an end to end solution that brings together user registration, newsletter sending and competition entry management – giving a station a total view on a listener’s activity with them.

The modular nature of RadioBase and Folder meant that the site was created from scratch within three weeks of sign-off from NME Radio.