Commercial Caroline 9

Following the takeover of Project Atlanta (Caroline South) by Planet Productions (Caroline North) plans were underway by early 1966 to increase the transmitter power of Caroline South and revamp the station’s format – both intended to win back audiences and advertisers which had been lost to the much more powerful and slicker presentation style of rival, Radio London.

However, the grounding of the South ship, Mi Amigo in January 1966 and the subsequent need to move her to the Netherlands for repair delayed this initiative until the spring of 1966. In the meantime for nearly four months Caroline South was only able to provide a low power, rather intermittent service from the former Radio Syd ship Cheeta 2. Signal strength was poor, there were frequent breakdowns and audiences as well as the all important advertisers disappeared rapidly. (for full story see Radio Caroline South history).

When Caroline South returned permanently from the Mi Amigo in April 1966 it was with a hugely increased transmitter power of 50kW and on a new clearer wavelength (259m) – enabling its signal to be heard across a much wider area – and a revamped format designed to rival Radio London. The result was that by the summer of 1966 a National Opinion Poll survey showed that Caroline’s audience had nearly doubled from 15% to 28% over the previous four months and it now had the largest audience of any offshore station – 9 million regular listeners. In its newly extended area Caroline South increased its audience in the Midlands from 11% to 19% of all adults, and in the west of England and South Wales it rose from 4% to 11%.

Coinciding with this success Radio Caroline brought in two experts from Canada with extensive experience in commercial radio sales. Terry Bate and Allan Sleight were responsible for the introduction of offshore radio’s most successful commercial initiative – Caroline Cash Casino and later a number of other sponsored competition programmes which generated enormous revenue income for the station.

For the full story of Caroline Cash Casino see the Special Exhibition here.

Trade press campaign

As part of its bid to increase airtime sales Radio Caroline launched a trade press advertising campaign to promote the audience sectors available to prospective advertisers - the ‘Caroline Ears Campaign’.