Making a return appearance to RadioDays Europe after speaking at the 2022 conference, SCA chief executive Grant Blackley presented again this year on the success the company has had with its eco-system LiSTNR.
For people unfamiliar with the scope of the business in Australia, Grant Blackley’s first slide in Prague was an explainer about the scale of SCA which included a list noting it ran 100 broadcast radio stations and was home to 600+ podcasts.
He explained that LiSTNR had just celebrated its second birthday and now offered “the best in live radio and had launched exclusive and locally produced music podcasts that combine full-length songs.
“We broadened our premium original content slate with the likes of Hamish & Andy, and It’s A Lot with Abbie Chatfield.
“We have the biggest and best Australian-made news with 7AM and The Briefing, not to mention our extensive slate of hyper-local news produced from over 65 offices around Australia giving locals a personalised audio experience like no other.”
Grant Blackley then told his audience he would share how the consumer behaviour changed. And how does SCA enable conversations with the audience to deliver a brand message?
Grant Blackley in Prague this month
Keeping it free and adding video
LiSTNR’s three main pillars are Personalisation, Content and Discovery and Commercialisation.
“But we are at the start of a fourth pillar emerging and that is visualisation.
“We’re increasingly noticing the boundaries between audio and video beginning to merge, particularly in the podcast space as platforms like YouTube and Spotify expand their support for visual podcasts.
“Though we’ve visualised our content for over 10 years, we’re accelerating our capabilities in this area. Recently we moved our flagship Melbourne studios and had the opportunity to build 14 new studios from scratch, ready for the visual era. With 4K cameras, lights and screens in every studio, optionality around seating and format, and the ability to rebrand a space at the touch of the button, we’re excited about the future video content we can create.”
Blackley then gave some more detail on each the pillars.
Personalisation
Personalisation is at the heart of our app. As a radio business we are fundamentally used to curation, building a select offering for a specific audience. But for LiSTNR which appeals to Australians, we need to personalise the product to ensure a meaningful and relevant experience for everyone.
We store audience data against a LiSTNR ID, a secure and private profile that contains all a users information, their preferences and actual usage.
To do this, we use some scalable cloud platforms including Google Firebase and Salesforce Customer Data platform and marketing cloud. By storing all data in the cloud, these platforms enable us to deliver a familiar and continuous experience across all devices and channels. Whether that’s using the mobile app, the website or even through email, all touchpoints are personalised to the user.
Discovery
Content Discovery is probably one of the toughest challenges in audio…people form very strong habits and you need to listen for a long time to decide whether or not you like a show. Often people rely on word or mouth recommendations as their friends understand them the best and often have similar tastes. Our goal is to provide content recommendations that are as good as a friend’s and are also relevant to the person at that moment. The recommendation has to be good, but the timing of the recommendation has to be right.
The way we’re approaching this challenge is by partnering with AI and ML companies to understand users better and to make predictions on what they’ll listen to next. Our partnership with Sourse sees us ingest all the listners preferences, habits and usage patterns and use AI to predict what content they’re most likely to listen to next.
To enrich this further we’re also using our partner Sonnant to transcribe shows.
Commercialisation
Our ad offering is the at the core of our commercialisation strategy.
We need to create competitive and compelling opportunities for brands and agencies to engage audiences on our platform. As a baseline, we provide our clients with addressable audiences, fuelled by our first-party data. This means that the digital audio inventory on LiSTNR can be targeted by age, gender, location and device.
But this is just the start. We’ve partnered with Number Eight with a technology that uses telematics and other data (such as what Wi-Fi you’re connected to) to deduce where a user is listening.
Another partner we work with closely is Frequency – they enable ads to be truly dynamic, changing the creative based on the person who’s listening and what’s happening in the world around them. This can be location, the weather, and the day’s UV index. But one area we’ve pioneered in is sports. We offer integrations with live sports scores across all our broadcast games. Allowing advertisers to adapt to the changing score of each match.
Visualisation
The promise of visualisation is that it leads you to a versatile product that can be distributed across many more platforms (such as social media which is highly visual in nature). Which of course can fuel discovery and consumption.
Increasingly we’re also seeing long-form visual content work really well for watch times. If the device has a screen sometimes it’s as compelling to watch as it is to listen.
We’ll always be audio-first, so we need to create video as a by-product of that production process, rather than a separate stream. To that end we’re working with partners like Adobe and platforms like Riverside, to automate as much of the capture and editing process as possible. To create a scalable audio and visual output for every show we make.
Before departing, Grant Blackley updated the Radio Days audience on what had happened at LiSTNR along its short journey.
Milestone decisions included turning off supply of audio to Tune-In, launching a new LiSTNR web player, switching off 85 Triple M and Hit Network apps, securing more digital streaming sports rights and securing deals with Stitcher and Wondery.
See also:
SCA’s Grant Blackley tells international market about five-year digital transformation
Live broadcast radio remains key at SCA, but digital audio revenue climbs