BotW: Kiis prepares for a fierce gumming from ACMA; Radio National's audience emergency; How to spend $770m
Welcome to Best of the Week, written on Saturday morning at beautiful Sisters Beach, Tasmania, after three hectic days of running around in Sydney.
Today: The Kyle & Jackie O Show may have breached the radio rules, but that doesn’t mean there’ll an an actual consequence; the radio ratings see ABC Radio National move into crisis territory; how should Nine spend its war chest?; and are those green shoots?
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The vibe
One of the many benefits of working around the media and marketing industry is spending time with people who can give you a sense of which way the wind is blowing. It is, after all, their job to know.
In May 2023, I had coffee with a media agency boss and we got to talking about The Voice referendum. That was four months before the date of the vote had been announced. The assumption in the soggy centre circles in which I circulate was that the Yes vote would get up. This was incorrect, he argued, with data to back his point of view. That was the first time I’d heard it, and he was, of course, correct.
Similarly, after months of hearing that Labor had done too little to win a second term, the presentation from Roy Morgan’s Michele Levine at Mumbrella’s Retail Marketing Summit last week was the first time I heard that the wind had changed, and maybe they’d return after all. We’ll find out whether that one was correct five weeks from today. Thank goodness it’s going to be a relatively short election campaign.
And this week, I was able to conduct another vibe check. On behalf of Mumbrella and Boomtown, I moderated a round table discussion of a dozen senior marketers, mainly from the retail and travel sectors. The conversation was conducted under the Chatham House rule, which means I can’t share names.
Fascinating for me from those marketers was the optimism level. After at least a decade of people moaning about the state of the economy and their own business challenges in such conversations, this was as optimistic a group as I’ve heard.
Cautiously optimistic, admittedly. But optimistic nonetheless. I came away thinking of green shoots.
And on Thursday morning, while we were running the CommsCon conference, came a public update from a weather-maker of the sector. CoStar has upped its bid for Domain to a best and final offer of $4.43 plus 4c in franking credits. That values Domain at nearly $3bn, and after tax would deliver $1.4bn to majority owner Nine.
They’ve now moved into due diligence, with the likely next stage after that a binding proposal. The deal seems to have enough momentum to get done.
And then we’ll get to find out whether Nine’s management, board and dominant shareholders - CEO Matt Stanton, chair Catherine West, future chair Peter Tonagh, and the Gordon family - can actually agree upon a big vision for reinventing the company.
Even after paying down Nine’s $629m debt, the proceeds of a deal at the current price would leave Nine with a war chest of $770m.
Spent wisely, that’s enough to remake not just the company but the sector. There are so many possibilities. If they have a vision.
The boldest move would be to go all-in on a future as a streaming-led screen company. Buy Foxtel’s entertainment service Binge from new owner DAZN, which is sports focused. And Optus Sport. Chase all the NRL rights, free to air and streaming.
Lobby to change the media ownership laws. Buy the Seven network, and become the ITV of Australia, with NRL and AFL under one roof.
Get out of the under-performing Nine Radio division. Find a private equity buyer, and negotiate a carried interest to share the upside if they turn it around.
Either sell the publishing mastheads, or buy Capital Brief owner Scire to get management team David Eisman and Chris Janz back into the fold.
Buy an outdoor advertising company - Ooh Media or QMS.
Just do something.
Whatever Nine does will set the direction of the entire media sector. The wind is going to change, and we just don’t yet know the direction.
An audience crisis for Radio National
The first set of radio ratings of the year arrived on Thursday.
Most shocking was the accelerating decline in audience for ABC Radio National across the five capital cities. (Declaration of interest: I co-present MediaLand for them on a Friday evening.)
Worst was the performance of RN in Sydney and Melbourne, where it had an audience share of just 1.2% in both cities.
In Sydney, that put RN 15th in a survey market of 15. Not only was RN less listened to than minnows like SEN and Sky Sports Radio, but also beaten by its more poorly resourced sibling ABC Newsradio, which had a share of 1.4%.
Clearly, the ABC has a different public service remit to commercial competitors. But in order to serve its audience, it still needs an audience.
Almost nobody born since 1985 currently listens to RN. If the average number of people listening to a station in a city is below 1,000, it gets an asterisk in the ratings table. Across the age groups of 10-17, 18-24 and 25-39, RN gets five asterisks across each of the capital cities. In other words, the average number of people listening to RN below the age of 40 is literally too small to measure.
The average number of 40-54 year olds listening to RN across the five cities at any given time is 3,000.
Even looking at cumulative audience - the number of people who tune in at least once during the week, RN’s reach is small - 135,000 of Sydney’s 4.6m radio listeners. The cume number is 143,000 in Melbourne, 80,000 in Brisbane, 38,000 in Adelaide and 53,000 in Perth.
That means that across the capital cities, RN’s total reach in any week is just 449,000. The other 13.9m radio listeners never tune in.
Compare that to the UK, where the BBC has a share of 44.2% of listening, or 31.7m listeners.
By the way, when I write about this topic, a question that usually gets asked is what about people streaming their radio listening instead? The ratings cover that form of listening too.
They don’t cover podcasts though. RN’s Conversations show had 381,000 monthly downloads in the most recent Australian Podcast Ranker data. The RN Breakfast podcast had 100,000 monthly listeners, compared to a 199,000 weekly five city radio cume.
Most problematic for RN is daytime listening. In Sydney, its share of the listening audience drops to 0.8% in the 9am to noon timeslot. Life Matters? Not very much.
A change of presenter has not helped the trajectory of RN’s breakfast time listening.
Just as the departure of Fran Kelly saw her successor Patricia Karvelas talking to a declining audience, the same goes for PK’s replacement Sally Sara.
This week’s numbers were by some way RN’s worst of all time for the 5.30am to 9am slot.
In Sydney, the number of RN’s breakfast listeners fell by 53%. With the exception of the first survey after Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson switched from 2Day FM to Kiis in 2014, there’s never been as big a percentage fall in a single survey.
In Melbourne RN’s breakfast time fall was 35%.
You can see from the bar at the far right of the table above just what a dramatic fall it was in the latest numbers, in a trend that was already one of steady audience decline.
There would not be many ABC services that are more expensive for the organisation on a per-listener basis. So far, the ABC’s reinvention of Radio National has been incremental. Is it time for something more radical?
Kyle & Jackie O get gummed by the most toothless tiger in the media jungle
Speaking of The Kyle & Jackie O Show, the Australian Communications and Media Authority yesterday creaked into action, with a relatively swift (for them) ruling that comments made on the show 11 months ago breached decency rules.
The affair is shaping up to be another case study in how the ACMA is unable to effectively regulate broadcast rules.
Although the conversation wasn’t much different from what was airing on any other Kyle & Jackie O Show broadcast at the time, this happened to be a day where a listener actually took the trouble not only to complain to the radio station, but then to report them to the ACMA when the network failed to follow the rules and get back to them.
As it happens, in the early weeks of the show broadcasting into Kiis Melbourne, I asked the network whether it had received any complaints, and it told me on the record that it had not. We now know that to be untrue.
As the weeks went by, with the wild content going out day after day, I chatted to other observers in the industry about how strange it was that audience complaints were apparently not going in to ARN Media, and then on to the ACMA.
As the ACMA report now reveals: “The Melbourne Licensee has advised that the cause of the delay was ‘human error brought about by a complex set of personal circumstances. [The complainant’s] referral to the ACMA has enabled us to identify and resolve vulnerabilities in ARN’s complaints handling procedures.”
I wonder just how many examples of “human error” buried complaints that should now be with the ACMA.
In the end it took a Senate estimates hearing last November - where Greens senator Sarah Hanson Young challenged ACMA boss Nerida O’Loughlin to read out a sordid transcript from the show - for the regulator to interest itself in the issue.
The ruling is the most solid test to date of ARN Media’s argument that Sandilands and Henderson should be allowed to be as smutty as they want because listeners know what they are getting. Most of the company’s defence was based on audience demographics, not the actual content on the day, which focused on Henderson’s hypothetical sex life along with that of callers including a butt plug-loving tradie and an exhibitionist wife.
The defence from ARN was literally: He’s a a shock jock so what can you do?
“Listeners of the Kyle & Jackie-O show make a choice when deciding to tune in to the show and they have certain expectations of the show when they listen. They are very often drawn to the dynamic personalities and bold content that the hosts deliver, particularly that of Mr Sandilands, a well-known ‘shock jock’.
“When regular listeners tune in to the Kyle & Jackie-O show, they do so with the knowledge that they will be exposed to content that will seek to entertain, and reflect their values, including their contemporary attitudes to sex.”
ARN Media also appeared to argue that ACMA are being fuddy duddies for even seeking to enforce the regulations. Don’t they even know what kids today get up to? It complained:
“The ACMA does not appear to have considered, or otherwise to have had any regard to, the changes to the way listeners who are predominantly aged between 15-17 consume media content today, which is more direct, unfiltered and on demand than ever before. These listeners are exposed to all types of content that is freely accessible online and often not regulated, including content of a sexual nature, shifting the standard away from what older, more conservative Australians might consider “indecent”.
The ACMA did not buy that argument: “The ACMA does not accept that the potential accessibility of sexual content online negates broadcast licence holders’ obligations to comply with the regulatory rules.”
As the ACMA report drily put it: “The ordinary reasonable listener would have understood that the descriptions ‘licking her vagina flaps’, ‘eating each other out’, ‘diddle yourself’ and ‘squirting’ were used as descriptions of explicit sexual activity.”
Slightly (but only slightly) more worryingly for ARN Media, given that other complaints about the show are now working through the system too, the ACMA points out that listers expecting the content is not so much a defence as an admission: “The references to sexual activity… did not occur accidentally or spontaneously. Rather, they arose from a conscious decision of the program to seek that information from the contestants and then discuss it in further detail.”
However, that does not mean that the end of this process will be an actual consequence. Supine as ACMA is when it comes to broadcast regulation, that’s in large part because it lacks meaningful powers. It cannot, for instance, fine a company that breaches the rules.
Instead, it can impose a new condition on a licence. And then if this specific condition was breached, it could, in theory (it’s never actually happened in practice) suspend or remove a licence.
The ACMA’s last chance saloon has a long bar.
What ACMA will do this time remains to be seen. It has - you may not be amazed to hear - kicked the can down the road, until it deals with other complaints already in the system. Most likely, at that point, the ACMA will resume its 16-year-tradition of giving Sandilands and Henderson stern tellings-off.
I called them a toothless tiger in Mumbrella back in 2012. We’ll find out in a while whether they’ve acquired any dentures.
Domain ticks up on Unmade Index
Domain edged up on the Unmade Index to $4.33 yesterday as the market began to anticipate that CoStar’s $4.47 offer will come to fruition. Domain closed on a market cap of $2.7bn, while majority owned Nine sank slightly to a market cap of $2.4bn,
Meanwhile Ooh Media perked up, rising by 3.8% to $819m.
Audio stocks ARN Media and Southern Cross Austereo rose by 0.8% and 1.5% respectively.
The Unmade Index finished the week in positive territory, rising by 0.45% to 539.2 points.
Time to leave you to your Saturday.
If you want to hear more from us, do catch my colleague Cat McGinn’s podcast conversation with Jodie Sangster about her plans for the Australian Centre for AI in Marketing. Last time Sangster was involved with an industry body she turned ADMA into an absolute machine. This time, it looks like ACAM won’t be held back by being a not-for-profit.
And you can find last night’s episode of MediaLand in your usual podcast places. Vivienne Kelly and I discussed the streaming battleground ahead of Monday’s arrival of Max; Radio National’s ratings (briefly), and The Atlantic’s Signal war plans leak.
We’ll be back with more next week.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
While I am in the pre-1985 birth club, RN is a work of art optimised for someone like myself. It is also a work that for many people much of the time, is best consumed via podcast. Most people aged under 65 shouldn't listen to it during their workday - it's not something that can do it's job well while it's listeners are operating heavy machinery or doing anything else requiring concentration.
Given that nearly 50% of Australians are aged 40 or over, that people aged under that don't listen is no great issue from a serving-the-public perspective. The Nine Radio talk stations have a similar age profile, and that doesn't stop them being the most-listened-to stations in Melbourne and Sydney.
Comparing RN's and the BBC Radio's total domestic radio listenership is unfounded, especially when the very reasonable RN vs Radio 4 comparison gives a similar result. Why shouldn't RN be as listened to as Radio 4? It's factual programming is at least as good.
I suspect the same kinds of people that listen to Radio 4 in the UK would listen to RN in Australia if they knew it existed. ABC TV is the most popular outlet the ABC has - some cross promotion would go a long way. Some more Radio 4 style comedy and drama wouldn't go astray either. Even if it's commissioned primarily for TV and simulcast or repeated on radio.
Some cross promotion for the linear broadcast on the ABC's podcasts would also be helpful. "Like this show? Tune your car to RN and be surprised with what else we've got!"