In a session on digital radio business case studies today at the ABU’s Digital Broadcasting Symposium, the CEO of Australia’s biggest commercial broadcasting network Grant Blackley talked about how his company is monetising DAB+.
“Southern Cross Austereo has 84 radio stations and 105 television signals… We are the largest landholder of digital spectrum in Australia.
“Our company elected to buy the full spectrum we were allowed for $4.7 million some years ago…
“We always felt DAB+ would be the most effective platform moving in the future, but when I joined 4 years ago I noticed the spectrum wasn’t being used very well. Brands were not associated with the parent brands and no one was paying attention. There were no commercial breaks.
“Things had to change.”
Implementing that change, Blackley and his team first looked at the brand families, they decided that theTriple M and Hit networks were so powerful they should align formats to complement those brands not compete with them.
There are now 4 DAB+ stations aligned with the company’s two major brands.
“DAB allows us to go the fringes of those brands,” said Blackley, explaining that a segment of make Triple, M listeners like country music, but the rest of the audience does not like it. If they played country music on their main channel they would lose listeners, so the company began a Triple M Country format.
“Triple M Country now has 150,000 new listeners in a brand safe environment,” according to Blackley.
“We can cross promote the brands on our main stations because they are complimentary not cannibalising each other.”
Once the brands were aligned and audience was growing, SCA needed to be able to communicate that to advertisers to generate more revenue. The company worked to get the audience date for DAB+ stations into the market place so they could sell the new audiences to the ad industry.
The strategy has worked.
“When we aggregated the brands we could offer an extra 9% of audience to advertisers, and increase our revenue… When we can measure it we can sell it… We have created a level of simplicity, making it easy for advertisers to buy both our FM and DAB audiences… We Believe there will be even more growth thanks to digital radio.”
The Digital Broadcasting Symposium is taking place in Kuala Lumpur this week. Our converge will continue during the conference.