SK Macharia’s Journey To Immense Wealth – Part 3
The smell of money
But still, despite the fact that Macharia curried political favour with the new government, he was still running a scrappy radio station that did not attract blue chips national advertising campaigns despite the stations high ratings. Citizen FM needed some thorough polishing.
To do this work, Macharia lured Fred Afune, a 28-year old advertising man from McCann Erickson Kenya. Afune as a copy writer had big ambitions to get into radio, but he did not see any decent openings. After negotiations with Macharia, he was hired as a programs manager in early 2003. Macharia also poached Gikonyo Macharia from Kameme FM to head his marketing team. Two years on the job, Afune and Gikonyo have emerged among the best brains in Kenya’s radio industry having overseen the launch of five new radio stations for Macharia and a revamp for Citizen FM. This is the team that stemmed a confidence crisis that almost rocked the station when five of the
prime time presenters for Citizen FM were poached by Quarcoo’s Kiss FM in one evening. All this has also happened at a period when Citizen has been pursuing an ambitious expansion of its coverage. Today, Macharia runs the biggest broadcast network featuring 48 transmitters. It is the only station one can listen on the highway between Mombasa and Kisumu. You can even accidentally catch it in Jinja, Uganda.
In December 2004, Macharia completed the expansion of Citizen TV and he claims that it now has a bigger coverage than KBC’s. Starting this year, he says that Citizen TV’s programming content will be overhauled to a larger audience. When Afune took over the Citizen job, he came into an industry that was dominated by Kiss FM, Nation FM and KBC. These stations seemed unshakeable. However, coming from the advertising side, Afune says that he had noticed the changing media consumption patterns. “Advertisers were increasingly getting wary of running advertising campaigns that were wasteful because all the radio stations were targeting the consumer with same income profile,” says Afune, “We saw this as an opportunity and targeted Citizen FM to the rural mass market.” This is where the majority of Kenyans lived and it was also a captive audience that we could easily sell to advertisers. Given that Afune had good credentials in the advertising circles and he was working as a team with the youthful Gikonyo, this strategy became a winner with clients.
After a while, Afune -who speaks Kikuyu, Luo and Luhya- saw an opportunity in the ethnic market. This led to the launch of Ramogi FM and Inooro FM. These stations became instant hits. In November, Afune led the launch of Y FM, a youth station that specialize in popular street culture and even broadcasts news in sheng. Later, Afune oversaw the launch of Mulembe FM and the next one will be the Kamba station. According to Gikonyo, the ethnic stations have attracted national advertisers because they allow them flexibility when monitoring their sales strategy. “It is easy to notice that sales are falling in western Kenya and initiate an activation on Mulembe FM, instead of running a wasteful national campaign with messages that other regions do not need to hear,” says Gikonyo.
According to Ng’ang’a, radio has increasingly become an important media in Kenya (its share rose from 32 per cent in 2000 to 46 per cent in 2004) because it is cheap, compared to print and television. However, the stations that will win advertising revenues are not those which “try to be everything to everyone”, but those that delivery specific, measurable audiences.”
Today, SK Macharia’s media empire boasts of 11 radio stations (Radio Citizen, Inooro FM, Ramogi FM, Musyi FM, Mulembe FM, Egesa FM, Muuga FM, Chamgei FM, Wimwaro FM, Bahari FM and Hot-96) and 1 TV station (Citizen TV), which currently has the bragging rights for most viewership.
