By Charles Lee Mathews In a media world built on endless choice and constant interaction, radio remains one of the few truly “lean back” experiences. You turn it on, and it simply works. For Nick Grubb, Kagiso Connect CEO, that trust is more than a quirk of the medium. It is the foundation of a broader business model now extending into insurance, lifestyle and data.
“This isn’t a change of direction,” Grubb says. “We built from and with radio, and we still believe massively in its power and endurance.” While radio remains relevant to audiences, traditional media is under increasing pressure as its share of advertising declines.
“From an audience perspective, radio remains a sticky medium in the portfolio of media choices people have, and so it’s quite robust in its relevance to audiences, despite the proliferation of digital platforms,“ he adds.
Tuning in to radio’s cultural truth
Unlike digital, which requires effort to curate, radio asks only that you tune in. Grubb says good radio does all the heavy lifting for you — and that trust has become a moat that can’t be easily replicated.
“The one thing that is really compelling for radio listening is that it’s just easy, and a lot of media choices these days require quite a lot of proactive selection, you know, they’re kind of ‘lean forward’ mediums, and radio is still one of those ‘lean back’ experiences,” he says.
Kagiso Connect operates Jacaranda FM and East Coast Radio, alongside local rights to Time Out, and holds stakes in OFM, Heart FM, Gagasi FM and Kaya 959. It recently diversified by launching Vouch SA, an independent digital insurance brokerage connecting consumers to financial services.
The power of selection in a world of excess
“We’ve been looking for business models that sit adjacent to our radio audiences,” says Grubb.
Time Out is a natural extension of the radio model. Both take the best of what’s available so audiences don’t have to.
“TimeOut is a lifestyle entertainment guide to living the best of your city. Like radio, it curates from the multitude of options you have at your disposal, many of which you may not know about, but that will add the most value so that you spend your precious time as productively as possible,” Grubb says. “Radio does this too, so there are a lot of commonalities.”
After a strong first year editorially, the focus now shifts to demonstrating commercial value to advertisers. Vouch sits further from the traditional media model.
“It’s not a media business at all,” says Grubb. As an independent digital insurance brokerage, it connects consumers to providers such as Discovery, Momentum and Telesure, offering both comparison and fulfilment across key categories.
Early days for nascent revenue
Both businesses are still in their first year, with modest but growing revenues. The bigger question is how effectively Kagiso Connect can unlock the value of its audience data.
Radio has given Kagiso Connect proximity to its audience. The next step is turning that into insight. “All the radio stations are going through this huge data makeover, so that you sell kind of inventory-backed by first-party data, irrespective of kind of measurements, and that you’re using kind of real-time data to guide how the stations operate,” Grubb says.
Central to that effort is SoundInsights, the group’s research brand, which provides analysis for both internal content teams and advertisers seeking emotional connection with audiences.
The art of data science
“Investments in data and research have been our single biggest focus since COVID. Advertisers are increasingly seeking more data points and want to understand audiences’ psychographics. Radio, as a medium, needs to work hard to compete with digital’s measurability. The medium needs to demonstrate its efficacy as much as possible,” says Grubb.
“We’ve got these two very large, very dominant regional radio stations servicing disparate demographic groupings and socioeconomic groupings within the footprint. We’re investing heavily to understand trends and what motivates our audiences to ensure our content remains relevant,” he says.
“We’ve invested heavily in a variety of platform-based and methodology-led research practises,” he says. As Kagiso Connect’s analytical engine, SoundInsights blends cultural intelligence and advanced analytics to deliver actionable insights to brands.
Understanding human insight
“Brands are looking for an understanding of the markets that they’re targeting in the same way that we’re constantly looking for an understanding of the audiences that we’re trying to reach, or the customers that we’re trying to build. I think real insights are messy. You know, South Africans are not this neat demographic segmentation. You can’t reduce an entire subculture of the country to kind of five neat summary lines,” says Grubb.
“If you’re really serious about meeting a target market, you need to understand that target market and at a depth that will be complicated. If you want to build and develop your market, you’re going to need to work with partners that have a deep understanding of the communities that they serve. That’s what we’re striving to be a partner to: brands and businesses that really want to get under the skin of the markets we service. Ultimately, what we offer is real emotional connection.”
In a complex world, making life simpler for humans is a compelling service proposition. But Kagiso Connect’s evolution from a traditional radio group into a diversified, data-driven business reflects a broader truth about the media industry. Survival lies not in abandoning what works, but in building intelligently around it by creating smart bridges to a more sustainable future.
Charles Lee Mathews is a senior editor to MarkLives MEDIA and a senior writer to MarkLives.com, as well as co-founder of The Writers, a writing consultancy.
