A glitch in the network
Plans to change the KIIS Breakfast show are on hold, for now. But what do the latest ratings tell us about the future of radio in the River City?
I jumped into an Uber about 6.30am on Tuesday to find the driver listening to KIIS973. I asked him why he chose that particular station; was it for the Breakfast line-up of Robin Bailey, Kip Wightman and Corey Oates, or the music?
He said it was a bit of both, noting that show’s newcomer, Corey, is “settling in well”. He also said the station had good traffic news, which is important in his business.
I told the driver that there were people at KIIS’s parent company, ARN, who wanted to replace the current Brisbane show with a networked Kyle and Jackie O Show.
His response: “Well, if they do that, they’ve lost me.”
It seems I have some good news for him. In an interview with Mediaweek, ARN chief strategy and connections officer Lauren Joyce addressed the issue of broadcasting the Breakfast show hosted by Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson live into other cities outside of Sydney, where it rates well, and Melbourne, where it does not rate well.
“It’s not a show that’s absolutely tethered to the city it’s produced in, I certainly think the show has potential beyond Sydney and Melbourne. We need the numbers to grow further in Melbourne before we’d be ready to make any decisions about going anywhere else. So, do I think the show is universally entertaining? Yes. Are we planning to take the show into other markets at this point? No.”
So, that’s a no — for now. (And, I suspect, that a big reason for that decision is concern over the campaign by the Mad F***ing Witches, which has seen many advertisers avoid the show because of its content. But that’s a story for another time.)
While many people, not least the local KIIS Breakfast team, will be happy to hear that, there is a strong argument that networked shows are inevitable due to cost constraints.
That’s certainly ARN’s position. It also owns the Gold network, where there is talk of taking its Melbourne Breakfast show, hosted to Christian O’Connell to other markets.
The plan there, it would seem, would be to transfer Gold Sydney’s successful Breakfast show, hosted by Amanda Keller and Brendan “Jonesy” Jones, to the Drive slot to make way for O’Connell. One imagines that they, too, would go national.
Asked about that by Mumbrella, Joyce was equally vague.
“We certainly think that, yes, there is a life for the show outside of Melbourne. As to when that happens? You know we haven’t locked down any plans at this stage.”
The big takeaway from the latest ratings survey is that music stations, such as Gold and smooth, are doing better than talk stations, even in markets where talk has long been king (more on them later).
So, what about Brisbane?
As I wrote the other day, KIIS 973 suffered a drop in the latest ratings. Bailey and Wightman have long said that their survival on air depends on them topping the ratings; otherwise they’ll be replaced by the Kyle and Jackie O Show.
However, there is no Gold (or smooth) presence on the FM dial here, and there have long been rumours that ARN might bring its Ipswich station, River 949, into the Gold fold.
But perhaps it’s 973 that could be rebranded as a Gold station, taking the family-friendly O’Connell Breakfast show and the music that southern audiences are enjoying. If that happened, Sandilands and Henderson could then be networked to the Ipswich station (which can be heard across much of Brisbane, too).
The sticking point here is that River 949 is actually a cross-generational success story just as it is — a local station serving its local market well. Would ARN risk that? Well, stranger and sillier things have happened.
In general, small businesses doing their own thing struggle to survive within big corporations, where the “one size fits all” approach rules. We’ve already seen this in fast-food and newspapers.
Meanwhile, one newspaper report on this week’s ratings noted the decline of the Nova 1069 Breakfast show with Ash, Luttsy and Nikki Osborne, which overtook B105 earlier this year to be No. 1 and has now, in turn, slipped to third place behind Triple M, which also led the pack overall, and B105.
I think the language used in the report was over the top, but Nova may have some cause for concern.
As I’ve noted before, the show had a ratings uptick due to audience “sampling” when Osborne, a popular social-media creator, was added to the mix at the start of this year.
Has the novelty of a new presenter worn off? The Nova team are by no means out of the race, but they’ll have to work hard if they want to get back to the top.
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Talk or no talk?
The other story of the ratings is the continued poor performance in Brisbane of the news-talk format — both the commercial version on 4BC, which had another in a long line of terrible surveys, dropping 0.3 points, and at ABC Brisbane, which dropped 0.7 percentage points overall but remained ahead of its rival.
Survey results were also down for 4BC’s sister stations, 2GB and 3AW. They surrendered overall leadership (to music stations, see above) but they both still have market-leading Breakfast shows and are competitive across most of the day.
But 4BC remains among the also-rans in Breakfast, where Peter Fegan now has a 4.6% audience share, down from 5.2 in the previous survey, playing against 7.2 for the ABC show, and 10.0 for 4BH’s resurgent Barbecue Bob Gallagher (who plays a lot of music and is also ahead of the KIIS trio on 9.7).
Across the day, 4BC only sneaks above a 5% audience share in Drive with Gary Hardgrave. (Things get better at night and, especially, overnight, when the shows are networked and the total available audience is much smaller.)
I have strong opinions about what’s happening at 4BC, and I’ve expressed them often. To me, it boils down to the powers-that-be in Sydney not understanding the Brisbane audience and not wanting to understand them. (Perhaps that will change if and when new owners are found for the network — although any sale brings with it the risk of a return to full networking).
Finally, thanks to some session breakdowns that fell off the back of a truck, I note the success of ABC Brisbane’s Saturday Breakfast show, hosted for most of the survey by Spencer Howson but on two occasions by Sally Rope. Their numbers stack up very favourably against 4BC’s Step Outside with Paul Burt on 4BC. I put that down to the quality of the hosts and, ahem, their choice of guests.*
*Brett Debritz was a producer at 4BC a few years ago. He has been heard on most stations over the years, most recently on ABC Brisbane with Spencer Howson and Sally Rope.