Radio's land of opportunity

Fairfax Media has made a few appointments to its board with the view to "renewal" in the lead-up to the retirement of John B. Fairfax. The new board member who interests me most is former Austereo boss Michael Anderson. Fairfax chairman Roger Corbett says Anderson "has had a very distinguished career in another part of media that is also very strongly orientated towards digital media but also has a very strong bias to sales and sales is an important part for all media companies''. I would be very surprised if Anderson isn't already running a mental ruler over Fairfax's east coast radio assets and asking why, with the very honourable exception of 3AW, they are doing so poorly. At least 2UE has the excuse that it's in a competitive market and that its competitor, 2GB, has the services of Alan Jones. In Brisbane, 4BC is the sole commercial talk station and it's not scoring too many listeners. Its 7.9% overall share by session, audiences 10+, looks pretty ordinary against 3AWs 15.4%. (In breakfast, 8.2% plays a massive 19.2%.) The thing about BC, of course, is that (as far as we know) it does well financially -- thanks to an award-winning sales team that punches well above its weight. But imagine, as any board member must, how much money BC would make if it was rating in the mid-to-high teens rather than in the less-than-tens. It's easy -- and, to my mind, very wrong -- to say Brisbane audiences are different to their southern cousins and that there's no more to be gained from the market. It's equally easy and wrong to lay all the blame on breakfast host Jamie Dunn for dragging the station down. Dunn is a great talent who's been moved out of his comfort zone and is doing his darndest. But, in common with voices on commercial radio right across both the AM and FM dials, he's sounding tired and old-fashioned. And in saying this, I'm pointing the finger not so much at the talent as at the programmers. At B105, which has regained the lead in the market by throwing a lot of money at advertising and having Hamish and Andy on in the afternoons, there's a great youngish breakfast talent in standup Stav Davidson. But he's doing "gotcha" calls, because (so the general wisdom has it) that's what you do on commercial FM. A new talent should be doing new things not just on air, but online (where Austereo's, and DMG's, strategy seems to be limited to posting Twitter links to US showbiz gossip). There's now a great moment of opportunity in the Brisbane radio market because there is no natural No. 1 station. Nova 106.9 is in a rebuilding stage after losing Kip Wightman (whose contribution to the onetime Np.1 breakfast program was, I think, greatly underrated), David "Luttsy" Lutteral and Ash Bradnam. I believe (and hope,for her sake) Meshel Laurie will also move on, and achieve great things elsewhere. Triple M is being propelled largely by the skill of its breakfast team, especially Brisbane radio stalwart Ian Skippen, not by its format. Only 97.3FM seems to be on track, with a female-and-family friendly format that snares the grocery buyers. When Hamish and Andy leave Austereo at the end of the year, the weekday drivetime slot and stronger across-the-board figures in Brisbane will be up for grabs. The station that can go in to 2011 with the right line-up, a clear, workable online strategy and a sense of purpose has an opportunity that hasn't presented itself for more than 20 years. There's no reason why that station can't be 4BC, not least because its natural audience is out there somewhere, listening to something else. I know there are some at BC who think drivetime announcer Michael Smith is the answer. Smith certainly is trying hard, but if he's not kicking goals in the afternoon with his rightwing rhetoric, borrowed from the very different US market -- and not, as some may think from Alan Jones, whose strength is not his political stance but his skill as a persausive orator -- he won't produce better figures at breakfast. What all the stations need are programmers willing to throw away a textbook that's clearly no longer relevant in the digital age, and talent that's prepared to engage with the audience and potential audience - be it by, shock, horror, catching a bus or train, strolling through a few suburban shopping centres, going to a show (not just the footy*) or getting online and finding out what's really pushing people's buttons. Nobody in commercial radio land is doing that at the moment, and it's reflected in the ratings.
* I have written before, and will almost certainly again, about how the potential audience's interest in sport is vastly overrated by the media.
Disclosure: Brett Debritz is no longer working for any Brisbane radio station, but he's open to offers.