HT&E delivered its six months result last week. Today CEO Ciaran Davis tells Mediaweek about diversifying ARN revenue, turning ratings leadership into cash and what is happening to the ACRAs.
Covid: We support the drive to get vaccinated
[Ciaran Davis told Mediaweek in the latest round of Covid lockdowns the company is managing it with some experience now under its belt.]
People are certainly more used to working from home.
This time around it feels like Sydney is experiencing something it hasn’t done at this level before. Mentally people are probably as depressed as Melbourne was toward the end of last year. Melbourne is just getting a bit fatigued by the whole thing.
For people to have a taste of freedom and then to be locked back down had a more negative knock-on effect than the first time around.
Trying to keep morale and wellbeing is important and we are working really hard on that.
We are supporting the drive to get people vaccinated. We are not pressuring anybody, but we are encouraging them. We are giving people a day off when they get vaccinated.
[Regarding making vaccination mandatory, Ciaran Davis said:] It is not something we are looking at yet. If a time comes when we need to consider we will consider it.
Ciaran Davis on digital profits
Digital revenue is still quite small and is still an infant within the business. A number of things have to happen before it really takes off.
Consumption is by far outweighing intent to buy at this stage. We still have an education program to do with advertisers and clients to show the effectiveness of digital audio and podcasting.
We also have a bit of work to do on measurement to show that we have a consistent metric in the market. And we have to make it easier to buy.
Those are things we need to do from an industry perspective as well as an ARN perspective.
One of the things we are launching soon is an audio planner. It is a proprietary tool we are developing that brings together all of the research we have from our neuroscience, our qual research and our quant research. It will be able to make audio planning easier for agencies. We will be able to articulate, backed up with real data, what creative works best in what environment and what time of the day to use a particular type of audio platform.
All of this by category, by audience or by demographic. We have been starting to show this to agencies and they are really excited by it and it will help with our total audio piece.
Growing revenue streams
Our board is looking at two areas. We are making investments to grow our broadcast radio and digital audio business and we are making investments to grow that under the pillars of content, distribution or digital products.
We believe consolidation is happening and every media company is saying they want scale of audience, multiplatform content delivery, ease of transaction and they want addressable IDs.
Look at what Nine has done and they are starting to target money that YouTube, Google and Facebook are pulling out of this market.
If you can bring media companies together that offer the pillars of scale, multiplatform content, ease of trading and addressable IDs then there is a significant opportunity to grow a good, strong, powerful organisation.
That is easier said than done and every media company is trying to improve their balance sheets and P&L performance this year.
[Davis said ARN is creating more of its own audio content. It also looking at a relaunch for The Edge after appointing Emily Copeland as the GM for the FM and digital broadcaster.]
We are not desperate to do anything. We understand the out-of-home business, we have a very experienced board, a great balance sheet. We have a very good core business in its own right, so we are not desperate to do anything. We are going to wait for the right opportunities.
Turning ratings into cash
We are performing better than we have historically. We have not yet quite cracked the nut in Melbourne, but we are excited about the new breakfast show.
The correlation between ratings and revenue is not just one to one. There are many factors including the commercial offering, the sales team etc. We are certainly pleased with the share gains we have made over the past 18 months.
ACRAs and Radio Alive under a Covid cloud
There are number of possibilities the CRA board has been discussing. It is a real shame because the Awards are a huge thing for staff and it’s a great night for them all.
Future challenges post-Covid
We have seen overall radio listening increase and we have abolished the concept that radio listening is in-car only. We have seen a migration to live streaming and that will continue.
The SME market might be slower to come out of lockdown, but it will come back.
We are excited about the work Jo Dick is doing at CRA to promote the industry and the effectiveness and looking at things like measurement and attribution.
It will be good to go to market with one voice which is going to drive more share into radio.
Over the next few weeks the commercial directors of SCA, Nova, Nine and ARN are doing joint presentations to all the agencies on radio and where it is going. That is really positive to see.
We are currently about 8% of total advertising and if we can drive that higher to 10% and fight amongst ourselves for that share it is worth doing.
See also: Ciaran Davis delivers ARN 2021 half year results: Strong recovery with digital dollars soaring