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Heart Closed Premises
DRY_SWEEPER
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Just one thought, with the new regional stations and Heart still either owning or leasing the closed sites, do you think Tabor is playing safe in case this is a white elephant and Heart lose alot of listeners like they have in the suffolk area
By still having access to the old sites he could easily put it back again to that of before, just as thought!
By still having access to the old sites he could easily put it back again to that of before, just as thought!
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Selling airtime to potential advertisers??
If they increased localness again they wouldn't increase the number of studio centres, it's much cheaper to run several services from a regional hub.
As bluesdiamond says these are very likely being used as local sales offices.
Yeah I am aware of that, they are used for the sales teams, but the sites are still intact to broadcast from though should they need to change back
One thing though that occured to me was that it might be cheaper to rent a one office job in say the town centre of Bedford than keep the existing premises etc, maybe in a shared office block
Actually, as far as I'm aware - they're not. Many of the sites have fully closed already - Leicester, for example. Assets, such as desks, mics, CD/MD players, processors, the Genesys computers, links to the in-house network; these will almost definitely have been taken out now.
I know that Plymouth's old gear has gone - it's now at HFM in Harborough, for example.
I think what you'll find is going on is that Global have leases running on these buildings that have not yet expired. If they are keeping local sales offices, these will, upon expiry of the leases, move to smaller premises. There's simply no point in starting a new lease on a new property, until the old one has expired. Just not commercial sense.
It's also fairly common practice for Sales and Programming to have separate moving programmes.
That's just very silly. It'd make selling to local clients near-impossible. A lot of the time Sales Execs will actually travel to the client's business to present a proposal of how their investment would work on-air. Mohammed must go to the Mountain, still. Local airtime is still going to be an important part of Heart's income and especially so in an era of reduced COI spending - a huge part of income for nearly every commercial radio station there is.
Nobody in their right mind would want to bin local sales.
No they're not. Leicester Sound's studios were ripped out the day after they stopped broadcasting from there.
Northants 96's studios are completely gutted.
Ditto for many others.
Most sales teams will be moved "on site" to the regional centres this year. I'm fairly sure this was all on one of the leaked Ashley Tabor emails. Radio Today ran it.
Don't think it was that quick but I believe the kit has now gone. It is still being used for sales though, my boss has had a few meetings there quite recently.
Don't forget though at Leicester there were only a couple of studios and some offices. In fact didn't Global base some sort of call centre there not that long ago?
Yes they are, I have seen photos of that.
They were certainly due to do it fairly soon the last time we (HFM) spoke to them.
The former Plymouth Sound equipment is very nice by the way. Thanks Ashley!!!
Gcap's call centre was coventry I believe. Not one of their finest ideas.
Quite a central location though.
But they bin local radio though :mad:
Yes it's great if you want to phone Mercia. But somoene at the front door in Brighton would expect to have the buzzer answered by someone at least in the same partof the country.
I see... not so great.
Yes, it was. The studios were dismantled the day after broadcasting ceased. This isn't guesswork or based on rumour, geezer. There wasn't any messing about with the studios: stuff was sold on, or donated, pretty quickly. Some stuff's now with community and student stations. Some of it very nice as well - although a lot of studios were utterly knackered and things were binned.
Sales are in Leicester for now, yes. But - like almost all - will move to the regional centre in time. Buildings will be sold in the rare instance they own them; rents will expire. Global are venture capitalists and cutting everything back to the bones. They're not going to keep open an office in Leicester, or Crawley, for one or two sales people.
Although they might give clients the impression they're still "in town", of course. That goes back years, though - and in the instance of Lecicester, sales staff were often shared with (and often based) in Northampton anyway.
No your right, they can go down the route of work from home sales, or even put the sales in the same building as the regional station
I mean its not that far from Luton, Bedford and Northampton to Milton Keynes for example, or from Cambridge to Peterborough
Sales is not an office based job anyway. Any field sales rep or more accurate account manager who spends a lot of time in the office isn't very good. Work from home and visit the office twice a week and that'll work. That way your sales staff don't waste time on the road when they could be earning money.
That is what they ARE doing. It has been the plan from the start!
No. If someone is setting up a radio station buying the kit is much easier than renting it. There's not much of a market for leasing out radio studios because hardly anyone would want one.
Bodderz - I know when we were at Source informal enquiries were made into taking on redundant gear at sites being vacated by CN and Lincs at the time. When I approached Lincs they were holding onto the gear being stripped out in Hinckley and Loughborough - most likely as a lot of it can be used for spares (especially if they have, say, a lot of the same console in use group-wide, the individual modules will generally still be good even if the main chassis is not.)
I'd say that's the way it works now. There's little point in travelling to Nottingham first thing in the morning, if you live in, say, Coalville or Loughborough and are going to be visiting clients in Leicester.
This ^^^
In fact the last sales team I managed all worked from home, we didn't have a local office, weekly sales meetings were held in a pub!