Chris Evans takes to the airwaves live from Cannes

DJ Chris Evans hosted his Virgin Radio Breakfast Show live from La Croisette on the Wednesday of Cannes Lions. Business Reporter Liam Kelly gives the lowdown on the show and how its unique advertising model works. 

Breakfast show DJ Chris Evans has hailed his Virgin Radio show’s innovative ad break-free partnership with Sky, describing the setup as “a game changer for the business”.

Evans – who rejoined Virgin Radio in January after almost 20 years away – sealed a deal with the satellite broadcaster to have no advertising breaks, but it would be presented “in partnership” with Sky, who create branded content and competitions for listeners. It was a first for British commercial radio.

Speaking at the 66th annual Cannes Lions festival of creativity, Evans said that “[Sky’s] content enriches our show, because we want to talk about the things that they’re doing”.

The DJ, who was speaking after hosting his breakfast show live at the Havas Café on the Croisette in the centre of Cannes, discussed Sky content in the form of Royal Ascot and the Cricket World Cup this morning.

Had his Virgin Radio breakfast show struck a traditional advertising partnership with Sky, “it would have been fine”, Evans said, though “we then wouldn’t be talking about their content because we wouldn’t have to, because we would have had the ads”.

“We have a deal with them, we have exclusive access to what they’re doing,” he said. “They understand that we genuinely want to champion what they’re doing.”

Sky trusted Evans and his team to make the partnership work, he said, after “they looked in the whites of my eyes and I looked back into the depths of theirs”. He added that it reminded him of raising £85m from private equity backers to buy Virgin Radio in 1999.

“When they give us a challenge of promoting Chernobyl, the Cricket World Cup, Royal Ascot or James Corden’s show, we can’t wait to get stuck into that,” Evans said. “Their content is a rich well for us, and we’re a loud hailer and magnifying glass for them.”

When asked by Campaign magazine’s head of media, Gideon Spanier, whether the unique advertising setup was a model that other broadcasters should adopt, Evans said that radio stations “could do it, should do it”, because the proliferation of smartphones meant that people “have an advertising billboard in their hand” and can “get used to [advertising] so it has no effect whatsoever”.

However, he said that both advertiser and outlet must “mean it, because it won’t work otherwise”. “You have to have two brands or two platforms who meet in the middle somewhere,” he said. The upshot of the Sky deals means that he can become a “filter” for listeners overwhelmed with choice in terms of consuming content.

The deal means that, each morning, Evans doesn’t know how or if he will be advertising Sky on the show, which keeps listeners on their toes: “It fires the synapses off.”

During the live broadcast Evans, whose show has 1.1m listeners according to the latest industry figures, asked listeners to write in and guess which adverts featured songs had been in.

Among the records played were Primal Scream’s Moving On Up, which was used in a Kellogg’s commercial, and You Make My Dreams by Hall & Oates, which McDonald’s deployed in an advert.