Sorry, another London story…

After 34 years of broadcasting, London radio station LBC is to re-brand itself. Well, sort of. LBC has hitherto stood for “London Broadcasting Company”. In perhaps the subtlest radio re-branding since Smooth FM announced it is henceforth to be called “Smooth Radio” (oh, that’s happened too, by the way), LBC is now to stand for “London’s Biggest Conversation”. The renaming is part of a move to update the station by cashing in on its already impressive interaction with its audience and create a brand governed by user-generated content, in the vein of MySpace and YouTube. The station receives 140,000 phone calls and over 50,000 text messages per month, and claims to have broadcast around 3,000 hours of user-generated content in the last year.

Captain Kickback says: “Like many radio stations, LBC rents out its impressive database of registered listeners and responders, giving the advertiser an opportunity to speak to its relatively up market audience away from the clutter of the broadcast environment.”