Turn up on the radio
What I make of the latest ratings survey
The third Gfk ratings survey for 2024, released this week, has brought a few more surprises to the party that is Brisbane radio.
First the winners. Congratulations to B105 for winning overall and in the hotly contested breakfast shift. Kudos to Stav Davidson who has been at or near the top of the ratings tree for the best part of two decades (and yet he still seems so young and vital, like a 30-something Clark Kent) and, of course, to his on-air partners Abby Coleman and Matt Acton.
A small aside here. I had to go deep searching for Matt’s surname. It’s not on the B105 website as far as I can tell. That’s because surnames aren’t a thing in commercial music radio — with few exceptions, including over at Nova, where Susie O’Neill is always Susie O’Neill, even though her colleagues are just Ash and Luttsy. I can understand that being the case when she first joined the show, trading on her former fame as an Olympic swimmer. It was so people knew which Susie they were getting. Now it just seems impersonal, like being in a group of neighbours where the older people are being called Mr This and Mrs That and the younger people go by their given or nicknames.
Also doing well in Breakfast are Marto (Greg Martin), Margaux Parker and Dan Anstey on Triple M, Robin Bailey and Kip Wightman on KIIS (more on KIIS soon), the aforementioned, Ash Bradnam, David “Luttsy Lutterall” and Susie O’Neill on Nova, and not that far behind them, 4BH’s “Barbecue” Bob Gallagher — who, I believe, broadcasts from home and surely provides the best bang for the buck on radio.
4BH’s success, as a music station on the AM dial, is proof that:
+ streaming and DAB+ are evening out the playing field,
+ there is still demand for music from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and
+ it’s possible to do well in the radio biz by targetting an older demographic.
It’s all very close at the pointy end of the ratings, especially when you consider margins for statistical error and the fact that the survey still largely depends on respondents remembering who they listened to and then, often weeks later, entering that in a diary. (Part of the reason radio stations advertise on TV, social media and billboards is to convince the people with those all-important diaries that they were listening even if they weren’t.)
Now for the news-talk sector, which in Brisbane now occupies a space four or five percentage points below the market leaders.
ABC Brisbane has lifted itself out from the depths of its worst-ever ratings run, with Breakfast with Craig Zonca and Loretta Ryan asserting AM-band dominance over Laurel Edwards, Gary Clare and Mark Hine on 4BC. The 4BC team, whose contracts were only recently extended, had a right shocker, and they must be hoping the most recent result is an aberration.
The deeper situation at 4BC (disclosure: I worked there as a producer in 2021-22) is interesting. It’s part of a network that is not used to failure. Its sister stations 2GB in Sydney and 3AW in Melbourne are ratings powerhouses, especially in Breakfast (both won this survey, with GB’s Ben Fordham beating Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “O” Henderson, and AW’s Ross Stevenson and Russel Howcroft winning consistently by a considerable margin) and Mornings (Ray Hadley on 2GB has won the slot for longer than anyone, except Ray, can remember).
In contract, 4BC has failed to reach the stratosphere. Bill McDonald has been doing well in the weekday Mornings shift — and he’s still outrating the ABC, which shuffled Steve Austin back into that slot this year — but he suffered a drop in listenership in the most recent survey. Until then, the “jolt” between the lighter breakfast content and the more serious political slant of Mornings seemed to be working well.
4BC’s Brisbane Live Drive show with Peter Gleeson is still outrating the ABC, but I wager it’s not meeting expectations for a hard-hitting politics-driven program in a state election year. Wrong host, wrong time of day or wrong content? As I’ve noted before, maybe we’re all over it by the afternoon and want some lighter content. The early evening numbers are not helped by the Wide World of Sport program, which scored a lower share than ABC Classic FM.
Sport seems to succeed on TV and radio when there’s an actual game to see or hear. Not so much when people are just talking about it. Sport-only station SEN, which replaced 4KQ a couple of years ago, hardly worries the ratings statisticians.
The big successes 4BC is having are at night and overnights, which are on relay from Sydney. Also, its Weekend Breakfast show, with Olympia Kwitowski at the helm, is doing better than its weekday counterpart, especially on Saturdays.
Now, over to KIIS. It’s no secret that Kyle Sandilands wants the biggest radio audience in Australia. He’s said he plans to add the Brisbane Breakfast show to his portfolio.
Problem is, the Sydney-based Kyle and Jackie O Show neither won at home in the just-released survey, nor made any impact at all in Melbourne. To be fair, the show was only on air in Melbourne for three weeks of the 10-week survey, but I’m sure they were hoping for a strong, immediate reaction that would’ve turned the dial up rather than down.
Things could very well turn around, but it was not an auspicious start. It certainly would not sustain any decision to pull the very competitive Robin and Kip in Kyle and Jackie’s favour. But stranger things have happened in radio land.
Meanwhile, KIIS owner ARN, is hurting from its failed bid to take over SCA, the owner of the Triple M and Hit neworks. ARN’s third-survey ratings bright spot in Melbourne was the success of Christian O’Connell on GOLD 104.3 — a station it was planning to sell off under the now-collapsed merger.
Update: The results quoted here are based on share of available audience. Fewer people listen to the radio at certain times — for example, overnight — so even a significantly larger audience share at night could mean fewer actual listeners than in, say, a Breakfast show.
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