What we learned from Radio 360’s first outing; AI Upfronts speakers revealed

BY Tim Burrowes

June 6, 2023 10:23

What we learned from Radio 360’s first outing; AI Upfronts speakers revealed

Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade.

Today we dig into the first set of the new look radio ratings, and share the AI Upfronts speakers for next month’s humAIn – human creativity x AI conference. Plus, a twitchy day on the Unmade Index as the market reacted to another interest rate hike.

Unmade’s archive goes behind our paywall after two months, where it’s accessible only to our paying members. Luckily, Unmade loves an EOFYS as much as the next premium insights newsletter. Which means you can save 45% on the usual price if you sign up before the end of the month.

Announcing the AI Upfronts presenters

Cat McGinn, curator of Unmade’s humAIn – human creativity x AI writes:

We can today announce the lightning pitches that will be duking it out as part of humAIn’s AI Upfronts next month.

The presentations will showcase a cross section of new AI-powered services and products that have most potential value to the media and marketing world. The presentations vary from AI-powered radio creative to generative AI campaign development, to using AI to design customer experience, to creative production software.

The AI Upfronts include presentations by software giant Adobe, commercial radio platform Dashi, and Time Under Tension and Trilingual, two agencies that both emerged this year with generative AI tools and services for brands. The final presentation, which involves a project Unmade has been collaborating on, will be revealed shortly.

The upfronts (in alphabetical order):

AdGPT is a trained AI model that can create insights and campaign ideas from no more than a brand name. The tool will be demonstrated by Pip Bingeman and Amy Tucker, co-founders of Trilingual, a studio helping agencies and brands use AI for creative strategy, media strategy, AI training, research and forecast modelling. Tucker has previously held senior marketing roles at Shopify and Twitter, while Bingeman led strategy teams at Cutwater, Bohemia and Ikon.

Adobe’s customer experience, technology and innovation director Jamie Ragen will demonstrate Adobe Firefly, which is a family of new creative tools driven by generative AI, starting with image generation and text effects. Adobe’s Sensei GenAI services will be integrated across the platform as a “co-pilot” for marketers, intending to improving productivity and efficiency while providing full creative control.

Dashi is a project management platform designed specifically for the radio industry, allowing broadcasters to produce ads at scale. Dashi streamlines the briefing, creative writing and commercial production process for account managers, creative writers and audio producers. Abe Udy, founder of Abe’s Audio, and co-presenter of Unmade’s Start the Week podcast, will pitch a suite of AI solutions for commercial radio.

New agency Time Under Tension, which launched this year, will show off the agency’s toolkit for working with brands and agencies to train AI models as brand chatbots along with driving wider customer experiences. The presentation will be from co-founder Jason Ross who was previously managing director at Accenture Digital.

The fifth and final AI Upfront will be revealed in the coming days, when Unmade unveils a project we’ve been working on in the publishing space.

Tickets for humAIn, which takes place in Sydney on July 12, are on sale.

A new start for radio ratings

Tim Burrowes writes:

Yesterday marked the first public outing of Radio 360, the updated ratings methodology for the radio industry.

If Survey 3 sees an odd moment to launch Radio 360, I suspect there was a delay. The background briefings for the trade press on Radio 360 took place back in March, a few days before the release of Survey 1.

Much of the methodology is the same – close enough that there’s no data break of the type that accompanies a complete change of currency.

For the most part, the numbers are still decided by 50,000 people per year sitting down with their paper (or electronic) diary and trying to remember what they listened to, and for how long.

However, the system is now augmented by a (for now) much smaller panel of 2,000 people wearing GfK meter watches capturing whatever they’re listening to. And streaming listening is now logged directly from station websites.

I’m vaguer about how those three factors of diaries, meters and server logs are blended into the overall hybrid ratings number. I did ask at the original briefing and didn’t get an answer.

The other thing still missing from the public data release is a five-city metro number for the various networks. The data is there, but doesn’t get publicly released.

As usual that led yesterday to unverifiable (to the trade press) press releases yesterday from Nova Entertainment claiming to have highest total network cumulative audience, the most broadcast listeners and the most listened to network nationally; from Southern Cross Austereo claiming to be winning in 25-54 nationally; and from ARN also claiming to be the number one audio network. Everyone’s a winner.

Let’s start with new things that we have learned.

2GB and 3AW listeners are (apparently) massive streamers

New to Radio 360 is a breakdown of listening by “radio type” – in other words, whether people are listening via broadcast over AM, FM or DAB+, or via streaming.

Sydney listening share by radio type | Source: GfK / CRA

Counterintuitively, Nine’s talk stations 2GB and 3AW have by far the most streaming listeners, despite skewing older. Check out Sydney breakfast in the table above.

While 2GB’s Ben Fordham gets 15.1% of Sydney’s over-the-airwaves audience (behind Kyle Sandilands & Jackie O’s, 20%) Fordham gets double that – a massive 30.4% of streaming. That’s well ahead of Kyle & Jackie O’s 13% on Kiis.

Melbourne listening by radio type | Source: GfK / CRA

The same occurs in Melbourne. 3AW’s Ross Stevenson and Russel Howcroft get 19.5% of the airwaves audience and almost twice that, 35.7%, of the streaming audience.

I’m not saying Nine’s server logs are inadvertently double counting their streams (or counting non-Sydney based listeners). But I wonder whether Nine’s server logs are double counting their streams.

(6pm update: On reflection, there is a better explanation. I don’t think it is double counting. For the music radio industry, it’s a scary explanation. What if people who stream are gravitating straight towards the likes of Spotify for their music, leaving only talk radio as streaming-proof? I’ll expand on that properly in Saturday’s Best Of The Week.)

So what else do yesterday’s ratings tell us?

Kyle & Jackie O stretched their lead over Ben Fordham

Kyle and Jackie O are dominant for cume | Source: GfK

For one thing, the Kyle & Jackie O Show, on Kiis, has grown its cumulative weekly audience yet again – this time to an extraordinary 921,000. Could they yet crack a million? That would be amazing for one city.

That cume number also explains how the duo have overtaken 2GB’s Fordham for top slot.

Although Fordham’s average listening number (see the table below) has faded a little his cume number in the table above has stayed steady.

Ben Fordham didn’t drop the ball, K&J stole it

Meanwhile Kyle & Jackie O’s average listening audience in Sydney of 141,000 was also another new record for them. There are plenty of shows that would be jealous of that for a national number.

2GB is recovering in drivetime

Sticking with 2GB, Chris O’Keefe seems to be working better in drivetime than Jim Wilson. While numbers have not fully recovered from when Ben Fordham was in the slot, O’Keefe has delivered three improvements in a row.

Radio National’s five-city breakfast audience is now below 50,000

You have to wonder how low an audience needs to get before something changes.

At ABC Radio National, Patricia Karvelas’s share of the breakfast audience has shrunk again. She now commands just 1.5% (yes, 1.5%) of Sydney listeners; 3.1% in Melbourne; 2.7% in Brisbane; 1.6% in Adelaide; and 0.4% in Perth.

That Perth RN breakfast number is an average of just 1,000 listeners – the lowest that can be recorded without returning an asterix. In the evenings in Perth, RN actually gets the dreaded asterix.

The ABC’s review into its radio operations is getting urgent, even if public broadcasters move slower than their commercial counterparts. The ABC also argues that it does better on podcasts. However, despite its promises (including yet another announcement back in March) it’s yet to join the Podcast Ranker.

The fourth ratings survey comes arrives a little sooner than usual, on July 11. I wonder whether change will have occurred by then.