RTÉ's media sales department is seeking a sponsor for Oliver Callan’s new show on Radio 1, setting a sponsorship fee of €295,000 for 2024.
Mr Callan was confirmed last Saturday as the presenter of the station’s weekday 9am-10am slot, which has been named The Nine O’Clock Show in recent months following RTÉ's decision not to agree a new contract with Ryan Tubridy.
Short-break holiday company Center Parcs paused its sponsorship of Mr Tubridy’s show last June after it emerged that RTÉ had failed to properly disclose how much it had paid the presenter. Other former sponsors of the time slot, which had been held by Mr Tubridy since 2015, include Vodafone and Sky Broadband.
The sponsorship document suggests Mr Callan’s show will be “a sharp hour of entertainment that charms the mood of the nation”. He will discuss “trending topics, the latest in sport, the arts and everything that’s hopping in Irish life, while bringing his inimitable bit of craic with it” and offer a “wickedly fresh take on hot-button topics”, it says.
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Music, comedy and “fun-with-a-point” will be the order of the day, with the programme aiming to be “the radio show for everyone’s everyday”, shifting in tone from light to serious as it hears the stories of guests and listeners.
Mr Callan has been in planning meetings this week with the “reshuffled” production team for his show, which begins next Monday. He will be paid €150,000 a year under a two-year contract, he said on air last weekend.
The Callan’s Kicks satirist had been the main stand-in presenter for the slot, both before and after Mr Tubridy’s departure and during the period last summer in which RTÉ decided to keep the former Late Late Show host off air.
The company paying to put its brand name to the show will receive three sponsor stings during each edition of the show as well as five sponsor-credited promos that will run during other Radio 1 programmes throughout the week. Home page and listen-back sponsorship is also included.
The most recent listenership for the 9am-10am slot is 347,000, with this figure based on the Joint National Listenership Research (JNLR) survey conducted over the 12-month period to the end of September. This makes it the second-biggest programme on Irish radio, behind Morning Ireland.
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