There were a handful of Australians at The Podcast Show last week, a new London event that is set to become an annual fixture. Among those making the trip were a team from Southern Cross Austereo – chief executive Grant Blackley, chief operating officer John Kelly and head of LiSTNR Grant Tothill.
The conference proved a rewarding experience for the 6,000 who lined up to get inside the large event space in the London suburb of Islington. The organisers are committing to the future with the same location next year and then looking for something perhaps even bigger for 2024.
“This the first big trip we have made post-Covid,” Grant Blackley told Mediaweek in a break between sessions.
“We have done similar trips before. We spent a fair bit of time in the US and Europe before we built LiSTNR. All the plans we put in place after that have paid dividends. To get to talk personally with operators in different parts of the world and see where they are up to in terms of digital transformation and content development has been important for us.”
On the way to The Podcast Show in London, Blackley stopped at Radio Days Europe where he was a guest speaker. Telling his audience about the importance of the digital transformation, Blackley said the company may one day change its name to LiSTNR.
“I was invited purely on one basis,” he said about the European radio conference which was held in Malmo, Sweden this year.
“That was to share the story of the digital transformation that SCA has been through in the last five years. The conference wanted to hear how we went from what was a broadcast linear model to a fully digital audio company. Many media companies around the world are grappling with this. Some haven’t started the journey, and some are partway through.
“We are effectively complete. While that is not unique, there are not many who have completed that journey. We had a lot of interest from companies wanting to know what we are doing.”
SCA’s Grant Blackley and Grant Tothill in London last week
The last big piece of the SCA digital puzzle was the launch of LiSTNR in early 2021. Some thought Blackley might have been too ambitious with the plans for the audio streaming and on-demand platform.
“We are happy to take risks, but they are calculated risks. We have done this throughout our careers. The hardest thing about this journey was that when we visited the US and Europe five years ago there was no one for us to model ourselves on.
“We had no choice but to come back and plan for how we could get to where we wanted to be. There simply wasn’t anything off the shelf we could buy.
“We had to be curious and to have a reasonable appetite for risk. It’s part of our DNA as individuals and as a company.”
SCA moved from a podcast platform, initially branded PodcastOne using the name of their US launch partner, to an on-demand and streaming audio entertainment platform.
Grant Blackley: “There has been both success and failure. We needed to be agile and it took us about three years to settle on the type of model we wanted to build. We had 105 people working across 15 markets in the middle of Covid to build the product.
“Since launch, LiSTNR has grown from strength to strength.
“We have made 12 fundamental changes so far to LiSTNR. As we get feedback via data and analytics we start to see the product mature.
“While there continues to be a growing audience, we don’t want to be all things to all people. But we need to continue to develop our product suite.”
The main hall at The Podcast Show in London
Early in May, SCA told the Macquarie Media Conference there were over 600,000 registrations (cumulative from Feb 2021 to April 2022) for the LiSTNR app in the 14 months since launch.
Blackley said the biggest change was to introduce AI tools. “We have invested on an equity basis in three tech companies.”
While LiSTNR has international content partners, Blackley stressed that Australian local content clearly comes first. “Everything we have done in the last 4-5 years has been about building 108 original podcasts. We have 25 new music-only stations. We are also working with the major sporting bodies – AFL, NRL and Cricket Australia and we are building out how we can be very granular on a local level with news and information.
“All of those things had to come first. We feel it is what Australians want and we need to tell those stories well. We were disciplined enough to know there were five verticals within the podcasting arena we wanted to focus on. We didn’t focus on 15 or 20, we worked on ones we thought would generate the best return for us.
“Only then did we look at international partnerships and we are still building that out now. Part of this trip is seeing who is in the international market, what can they deliver and are they willing to partner with us.
“The BBC is our biggest international partner, but we also work with Disney/ESPN. We also work with Apple. Partners in Australia include Network 10.”
After stops in Malmo and then London, Blackley, Kelly and Tothill are now in the US speaking with existing and potential partners.
Mediaweek: Your place for news from the podcast sector
Tuesday: LiSTNR and exclusivity, Australia on the international podcast stage, future of SCA radio streams on other platforms
Wednesday: Audio futurologist James Cridland in London – what he shared with global podcast players
Thursday: Special double edition of Podcast Week with news of the hottest sessions from The Podcast Show London