December 2010
Pinata Stop Press, End of Year RadioFest Flashbacks, an Interview with Two Chairs and Interactive Regional Radio
STOP PRESS
News Just In - Southern Cross Media has announced that as of January 10th 2011 all
radio commercials for broadcast on its stations must comply with the
CRA standards for Digital Radio: that is NO MORE MP3 files. And
definitely no MP3 files to be sent on email.
So, for any commercials dispatched to Southern Cross stations, audio must be either .WAV or.BWF (Pinata file format.)
Production studios who've been following AudioNET recommendations for
the past few months are already complying so no need to change
anything.
Congratulations to Southern Cross for being the first to officially
and publicly support the new standards, and thanks for the early
Christmas present!
Hopefully other Networks will follow soon. If you need tools, you
can download the AudioNET Pinata Production Tool or AudioNET Pinata
Carting Tool from this
page
It's been a long time between AudioNET Newsletters.
We've all been flat out - except Sandy who holidayed in Nelson Bay for three weeks. The rest of us were very jealous.
Dave and Verity went to RadioFest and the ACRAS, working from breakfast until mid-dawn (which prompted weird radio flashbacks.)
Damien and Vaughan have been busy tweaking AudioNET's interface with AirCheck to keep all the backend running smoothly so we ensure our monitoring remains absolutely, unequivocally, the most accurate in the market.
And we're working on two great new projects for next year. One behind the scenes and one very much up-front. One's boring but extremely useful and the other one is great fun. Both will give radio networks new angles to pitch to agencies and advertisers.
The most entertaining thing about RadioFest was the superstars of radio panel. Rod Muir, John Laws, Greg Smith and Paul Thompson reflected on the past, commented on the current and mused on the future, ably compered by Triple M's Paul Murray. It was great to listen to, and somewhat awe-inspiring to see them live, side by side, but it really doesn't translate well in print. A true radio show.
The keynote speaker, Dom Sagolla, an original Twitter-er, gave a potted version of Twitter history, promoted his book and showed some happy snaps.
It was an energetic, interesting presentation with no direct references to radio, except in his opening where he said the highlight of his college week was presenting a Friday night radio program.
Ironic perhaps, that throughout the rest of the conference, references to digital and interactive kept cropping up.
In her opening, CRA chair, Cathy O'Connor, noted the industry needed to do three key things to grow radio's revenue share of advertising revenue: maintain quality of content, keep working together and speak a new language in the digital world.
She said the language for agencies needs to revolve around radio being interactive and personal and powerful.
Austereo Executive Chairman Peter Harvie also had a checklist of three for growing radio's share of advertising revenue.
Peter's key drivers were: rate integrity, getting greater yield from airtime inventory and opening up new client categories. He noted in his presentation that online and interactive are perfect partners for radio, explaining that last financial year 30% of Austereo's campaigns were cross-platform.
AudioNET interviewed both Peter and Cathy separately after the conference: read their insights
here.
Later in the conference, Austereo's Jeremy Macvean revealed that Austereo currently has 40 staff in their programming and on-air teams, dedicated to interactive material.
Jeremy said the demand for interactive campaigns from clients is huge.
However, neither Jeremy nor Peter gave any specific examples or provided any case studies of what Austereo's actually done.
Belinda Rowe, Managing Partner of Zenith Optimedia, noted that in the UK, radio is losing audience share to internet-based activities.
Belinda quoted studies from the US and UK which indicate
radio is becoming an ancillary function to TV sets and mobile phones.
On the bright side, Belinda pointed out that while other media are struggling to get younger audiences at a reasonable price, radio is doing well in that respect. However, she said radio's key assets are still hidden from media agencies.
According to Belinda, radio reps forget they need to constantly remind agency buyers about radio's greatest asset: listener attitudes. She quoted a comprehensive study undertaken in the UK last year which investigated how people listen to radio amid increasing digital streams.
Belinda said radio needs to repeatedly remind agency buyers, how close radio gets to its listeners.
Peter Harvie echoed this, "We are to a degree the forgotten medium in the minds of media planners and buyers."
Even so, Peter told the delegates that it was time radio consolidated its share of advertising revenue. He said during his considerable years in radio, its market share had hovered around the 8% mark, but never managed to attain and maintain that percentage.
He said even though radio is holding its own at the moment, total spend on traditional media is dropping so "We are not moving radio's share to where it should be."
Commercial Radio Australia chair, Cathy O'Connor, has indicated Australia's major radio networks will take a much stronger co-operative approach to grow radio's share of main media spend.
Austereo chair Peter Harvie raised the issue of main media spend at RadioFest, saying it was high time the industry consolidated at 8% share of main media spend.
Speaking after the annual conference, he said 8% was a realistic target given radio has hovered around this mark for the last decade or so.
"Politics is the art of the possible. 8% is achievable if there's a concerted effort on behalf of the industry," he said.
Cathy too, said 8% was a realistic goal for the present.
"I think it's really about having attainable, achievable goals and this is probably a shorter term goal. Ultimately I think double digits is achievable and should be achievable if the industry works together, " Cathy said.
"I think the benefits for radio to grow its business is the extent to which individual networks and the industry can play a bigger game, and that is talking to advertisers beyond the trading end of the market..trying to get higher up the food chain, so to speak, and talking about truly integrated cross platform ideas."
Both Cathy and Peter said demand from advertisers for cross platform campaigns is extremely strong, and this works well in radio's favour to grow revenue share and maintain revenue integrity.
"I can say certainly on behalf of DMG, there is a very big appetite for those broader campaigns that advertisers can plan across our online assets, our broadcast assets and our digital assets, and combine with events and promotions.
"And when you have a compelling campaign that is integrated and cross- platform, price is rarely part of the discussion," Cathy explained.
Peter Harvie said discounting prices actually reduces radio's share.
"If you can lift them (cost per thousands) up a little, then the two work together to produce a higher share. Because the share we're competing for is total ad spend, so therefore the more revenue you can generate, the more opportunities you have of increasing to the next level of share", he explained.
He said the problem with discounting is that it sets low expectations among media buyers and planners.
"It also sets a level for a certain genre," he said. "I mean you and I know stores and I say to you, "What's KMart?" and you say to me "It's a discount store." And I say to you "What's David Jones?" and you say to me "Well it's a department store." There's your difference.
"The difficulty is that you can paint yourself into a corner and be perceived as a certain practitioner in trading and some people trade and some people don't."
However, Peter's main concern about discounting is the flow-on effects for the Network itself.
"One of my concerns, that I was trying to express, (at the conference) was that unless a company generates reasonable income, that is, you charge reasonable rates, you are depriving yourself of the benefit of being able to invest..and investment in companies and in staff I think is fundamental to all of our success."
Peter says Austereo invests heavily in staff training, even when finances are tight.
"I have never come across a company which has maintained such wonderful focus on training, even through the ups and downs and bumps that businesses go through.
"Certainly in the 17 years that I've been associated with the predecessor company, the Triple M group, and then through Austereo, I have never seen such well-formulated and heavily invested training processes and not just for sales."
Cathy said all the major networks are building new sales models and new techniques for the future of the radio sector.
"We need more sophisticated sales operations and we need an approach that takes into advertisers' boardrooms the consumer experience that radio offers and the ideas and the cross platform extensions that the medium offers, in my view, almost better than any other, because radio and online are very compatible," she said.
"I think competitive forces are causing the Austereos and the ARNs and the DMG Radios to really improve their own sophistication and that will take the industry with it."
Cathy said market share is a constant focus of the CRA Board as part of the charter for CRA's Branding Committee. And she said CRA Board members now have a very collaborative approach to build radio's profile.
"We've talked a little bit about ways in which we might work together. Perhaps a portal where all radio stations can be streamed, which might then move to mobile applications. I know there is a greater appetite largely through personnel changes... for the three big networks to work together and there were discussions going on quite recently about that."
Many speakers at RadioFest mentioned digital and interactive and the challenges these media provide for radio. Only one speaker gave any practical examples. Southern Cross Group PD Rod Brice demonstrated how one of his stations leveraged international media coverage from good old-fashioned audience interaction and some new interactive technology.
SeaFM on the Gold Coast used its nous and some social media magic to lobby for Ellen DeGeneres to come to the Gold Coast. The breakfast trio of Paul, Moya and Braggs started with a Facebook page, added some twitters, got the local football team involved and then attracted 2000 people to Surfers Paradise to dance on the beach. The local campaign drew attention from national TV programs, (Sunrise and Kerri-Ann) and international stars (Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg.) By the time the trio flew to the States, Gold Coast enthusiasm had ignited national interest. Ellen's not coming - but the trio did get to present their petition in person to Ellen - on air!
Rod showed the video presentation on his laptop, beaming with pride the whole time. "Local stations are local heroes" he said.
Southern Cross doesn't have a team of 40 for its interactive campaigns, but Rod said they do have dedicated staff who all pitch in to help post blogs, and videos and tweets.
Rod said the mantra at Southern Cross is "Re-purpose, Reuse and Repeat." 90% of Southern Cross breakfast programs are on Facebook and another 40% are on Twitter and he said contrary to popular belief, some of the most active users of Twitter in the regionals are older listeners.
More Local Heroes
The Ellen DeGeneres campaign started us wondering. We know there are radio stations all over Australia that regularly get involved in community events and good causes. So we emailed around asking for examples.
Double Your Money in the West
Breakfast announcer Josh Withers from RadioWest in Esperance says his station spearheaded a winter radio campaign to raise money for the local outreach of Perth's Princess Margaret Children's Hospital.
The township of 13,000 people raised $24,000!
Josh says everyone pitched in from local schools to the chamber of commerce. But the highlight was an event where local bosses agreed to walk the plank off the local tanker jetty ( in the middle of winter!) if their staff raised $1,000.
Full details and pictures are on the
My Esperance website
From the ridiculous to the dangerous
Matt Howarth's pick for his team in Port Macquarie was about battling bureaucracy. The station was chuffed when PM Kevin Rudd agreed to a phone interview with 2MC News Director Nick Callaghan. During the interview, Nick pointed out the federal government still hadn't fixed the Pacific Highway blackspot where the Kempsey bus crash had killed 35 people 20 years ago. Apparently the PM was adamant that money had been allocated. But Nick persisted, so the PM flicked it to the then NSW Transport Minister. It took six months to get an answer and the State Government finally acknowledged the locals were right: the black spot at Clybucca Flats had no funding. Because both the Federal Government and State Government had been reassuring locals that money had been allocated - they then had to allocate the money.
On the flip side, what Port Macquarie lacks in road funding, it gained in the arts. The town has a 600-seat cultural centre that cost ten times more than it was supposed to, and sparked the sacking of the local council. Just before Easter this year, Star FM announced the Glasshouse was so unprofitable it was being turned into a casino. During the breakfast show listeners heard a helipad would be built to fly in high-rollers and a new monorail would bring tourists into town from the airport. Most of the listeners who called in were totally in favour of the project. At the 9am media conference, the local journalists assembled outside the venue, were told it was all an April Fool's Day joke. Matt says many locals are still disappointed.
While the major networks concentrate on cross-platform promotions and interactivity, and CRA promotes digital radios as Christmas presents, all these efforts are ignoring a simple but significant step forward for radio advertisers.
DMG and Austereo both have the technology to run advertiser logos and tag lines on their mobile phone applications and on-line streaming - but neither are doing it.
The simple concept is so simple it's just not a priority. The Networks are promoting complex cross-platform campaigns because they're worth a much higher premium.
Fair enough - they're trying to make a return on digital radio investments.
However this overlooks providing a simple value-add of providing logos and tag-lines for other radio advertisers.
Anyone listening to digital radio, or any radio station online or streamed on a mobile phone can see album art, song titles and station logos.
That same technology could be delivering advertiser logos and tag lines.
In fact, in many cases, the advertisers' audio is being heard - but the visuals with the audio are station logos and program information.
CRA also has a role to play and has dropped the ball. The Piñata file format which delivers text and images to radio stations, along with the audio, has been neglected by CRA since April.
The last meeting of the CCSG committee was told November 1st was an achievable deadline for all commercials to be delivered in Piñata format- but there's been no follow through from CRA.
Ironically, CRA's own Christmas brand campaign urging people to buy digital radios, was delivered for broadcast in Piñata file format.
CRA and the Networks might argue that advertisers are still getting value for money, because they're only buying spots for broadcast, and in fact, are getting audio streamed on-line and on mobile apps as a bonus.
AudioNET would argue that if it's good enough to provide free promotion of album art and song titles, why deny visual branding to paying advertisers.
That's it for now. Dave's determined the newsletters will come out with fewer snippets of news, more often as befits the modern technology. Verity's still stuck in journalist's deadline mode. We'll see what the New Year brings.
And the last word goes to.....Warren Buffet
"The business schools reward difficult complex behaviour more than simple behaviour, but simple behaviour is more effective."
And thanks to CRA for permission to use the official RadioFest photos of :Dom Sagolla, Belinda Rowe, Cathy O'Connor and and Peter Harvie. Photos taken by Andrew Jarvie.