Media Week

After all, according to this year's Sunday Times Rich List, his businessman father Michael is worth £620m, wealth that formed the mainstay of Tabor's successful bid to set up a company that now owns almost 40% of the UK's commercial radio industry, including iconic brands such as Capital, Heart, Galaxy, LBC and Classic FM.

Few will know how it feels to walk into an institution such as Capital Radio on London's Leicester Square as the owner having once been a humble, unpaid runner there as a teenager.

But therein lies the rub. For no matter how well 30-year-old Tabor eventually does running his newly formed radio conglomerate, he will always be open to jealous accusations that he is nothing more than a caretaker who has been given a very expensive toy to play with by his rich father.

If he succeeds, the doubters will say it's all down to his father's money. If he fails, it will be proof positive he was just a boy doing a man's job. There have already been mumblings that soon-to-arrive radio chief executive Stephen Miron is only being brought in from Associated at the behest of Tabor Senior's business associates, who fear "the boy" is out of his depth.

That is patently unfair, however. As this week's profile of Tabor shows (see page 14), the former pop music manager and publisher has a genuine and longstanding passion for radio - and a clear vision of what he wants to achieve.

Tough decisions have already been made and acted upon. More will follow. That is inevitable when two similar businesses are brought together and taken into private ownership out of the harsh glare of the City.

Tabor has situated his office in the middle of his sales team, in sight of the recording studios. He isn't hidden away in some ivory tower - at least, not for now. He has a solid team around him and sees himself as one of a passionate group of private sector business leaders who can expand radio way beyond its current 6% advertising share.

He may make a few mistakes along the way, but he should be given the space to try and achieve his ambitious aims - and get the credit if it turns out successfully.

Rarely can a sector have undergone so much fundamental change in 12 months. Rumbling along all year has been the will they/won't they story of the Channel 4-led second digital radio multiplex, which, with well-regarded former BBC radio executive Bob Shennan on board, now looks set to launch next April, once a capacity deal has been finalised with the owners of the first multiplex - Global/GCap.

At the end of last year, Emap cut a deal with Bauer to transfer its radio interests to the German media group, and the magazine specialist has spent this year absorbing these into its UK operations.

Global is in the process of integrating GCap into its business to form a radio behemoth that will really take shape in 2009. And now Virgin Radio has rebranded as Absolute, in a bold move that seems initially to have gone down well in the media sector (see page 14).

The names that ran the industry in 2008, including Ralph Bernard, Fru Hazlitt, Richard Eyre and Phil Riley, have been replaced by new blood such as Ashley Tabor, Stephen Miron, Donnach O'Driscoll (see profile on page 12) and Clive Dickens. But as figures for Q2 ad spend in 2008 show (Media Week, 2 September, page 4), radio faces severe challenges. Spend was down 10.2% year on year, with national ad spend down a massive 15.9%.

Q4 is going to be vital for radio if it is to continue to make its case as a really effective ad medium. In many ways, radio suffers from its flexibility: it is good at reacting quickly and being able to accept bookings at short notice, but that also means advertisers can wait until the last minute in an uncertain market to allocate their money.

Much of commercial radio has had the pressures of the stock market removed from it and is now in the private sector. Let's hope this fact, combined with the current noise and attention surrounding radio, can be translated into energy that will be reflected in greater client spend.

He established WPP's GroupM trading operation and made it the behemoth it is today, but WPP recently confirmed that Allan is moving from GroupM to succeed Alexander Schmidt-Vogel as worldwide chief executive of MediaCom, with Nick Theakstone rising from chief operating officer into Allan's old job. Allan has hired MediaCom UK chief executive Nick Lawson for the MediaCom EMEA role, with Jane Ratcliffe replacing Lawson.

So it's Theakstone who must build on Allan's legacy. He is a smart operator, but situation dictates he may find it more difficult to keep GroupM's agencies in line than his ex-boss.
In this week's profile, Theakstone points out that GroupM is about more than buying clout; it's also about supplying its agencies with proprietary and media evaluation tools, content and anything else they want.

But, as we reported last week, the likes of Mediaedge:cia are quite capable of producing their own tools and MindShare and MediaCom have long expounded the value of investing in content, so GroupM must find its niche within the existing initiatives at all its agencies.

There is also festering resentment at the agencies about the high service charges they pay GroupM, and some questioning of whether they could obtain better trading deals themselves.

Then there's the added complication that, not so long ago, Theakstone reported to one of his agency heads, Jed Glanvill, as head of investment at MindShare. The opposite is now true.

MediaCom's Lawson has conveniently been promoted, but Mediaedge:cia's boss Tom George may also feel differently about reporting to Theakstone than he did to Allan.

GroupM is a juggernaut that operates way above its rivals, but it is now entering a very different phase in its development, with different and difficult challenges ahead.