Commercial Radio Australia
Commercial Radio Australia is roughly comparable to the RadioCentre in the UK – an organisation I know well. So it was interesting to take a walk into the leafy Surry Hills suburb of Sydney to chat to the CEO Joan Warner, as well as Kath Brown and Richard Morris.
Commercial Radio Australia has been the driving force behind the takeup of Digital Radio in Australia. They’ve learnt from the UK well; grasping the opportunity to launch with DAB+, advocating the use of DAB slideshow at launch, organising the industry to avoid the trebling of costs that inevitably come with multiplex owners and transmission companies. And a quick look at the Sydney radio market makes you understand why they need to move digital: the market leader here, 2GB, is on AM. While it’s easy to see a future for FM receivers in mobile phones, AM is less easy to put into these devices. AM’s susceptible to increasing interference: not just from mobile phones but from things like ADSL as well. As I’ve said before, music radio on AM is increasingly not at a quality that listeners will tolerate. And AM transmitters (which are high power, tall, and not very nice to be close to) were originally built away from populated areas; but as cities have grown, these transmitters are now in the suburbs. A replacement for AM – or, at least, an alternative to it – is urgently required.
But the CRA is doing more. It’s responsible for the (diary-based) radio research here, which it contracts to Neilsen. Joan isn’t yet a believer about the effectiveness of PPM, pointing out the issues with breakfast listening that I’ve mentioned in the past. She demolishes arguments I’ve heard from Arbitron; points out that she’s yet to hear an adequate explanation for why the breakfast audience plummets when using PPM technology, and is bullish about the validity of diary-based research. (It is, after all, used in almost every single radio marketplace).
The CRA also offers advice to advertising agencies wishing to buy radio – and even offers a confidential and unbiased service which agencies can use to seek advice on their specific radio planning. The CRA also offers advice on the content of ads and their adherence to the advertising codes, like alcohol (and I’ll bet consumer credit and the likes). Interestingly, too – and unlike the UK – the CRA offers HR advice. It’s also responsible for the music licence negotiations, of which I can’t say an awful lot, given pending court action. (Yes, here too.)
From my point of view, I was most interested in the meetings they set up between all areas of the commercial radio industry. These give an opportunity to network, and to work together – to agree on the method of doing something, while leaving each other free to compete on content. A fine example is the engineering meetings they hold; and here, they’ve done something quite special to safeguard radio’s future.
The advent of DAB – a heavily-compressed audio format – makes it even more important to ensure that output is as ‘clean’ as possible before transmission; so a CRA project called “Piñata” was born, which sets a standard, linear, audio format for commercials. They could have left it there; but they were also mindful of the future. So, when a radio commercial is delivered to a radio station, Piñata defines what it can be accompanied with. It defines the format of scripts and music details (no more faxes!); and – excellently – it also defines a metadata standard for internet links and slideshow images. It also defines a unique ID for the audio – enabling all the benefits that linked data can offer. Images and links alongside audio commercials in your internet radio player are all of a sudden really easy.
This work was spearheaded by the CRA’s digital technical advisory committee and a working group of creative producers, digital courier companies and broadcasters was formed to ensure that these specifications work for all stakeholders. There’s no doubt that this is an excellent piece of future-proofing. As the UK moves into a world where many radio stations will share the Radio iPlayer, and therefore visual advertising is available for the first time in a unified way, would it be asking too much for this to be adopted in the UK as well?
The Australian radio market has more plurality than the UK radio market: no equivalent of Global Radio or the BBC here, in terms of audience share. It’s thus more important for organisations here to work together; and more evident that they do. Almost all commercial radio stations in Australia are members of the CRA (less than 1% aren’t); so the CRA displays a high degree of cohesion to advertisers and those that it lobbies.
I left the CRA feeling that the organisation is in rude health. There’s clearly strength in numbers here. The UK’s radio groups forget that at their peril: a strong and healthy UK RadioCentre is important for a strong and healthy UK radio industry.