Murdoch Drilling for Radio’s Digital Reserves

For DMG Radio Australia, the culmination of new formats, a change in program personalities and news that Lachlan Murdoch’s private investment vehicle, Illyria, has taken a 50 percent stake in the group, seems analogous to someone hitting a massive reset button to re-boot the broadcaster. 

For a company reporting annual revenues of A$100m, and earnings of around A$7m, each matter by itself is significant, but to see so much structural change occur within literally weeks must have management heads in Saunders St swooning with challenges and opportunities.

The material impact of these changes on the Australian radio market cannot be underestimated. It’s also tempting to consider the media fallout beyond the commercial radio market, with ripples spreading into online advertising and publishing relationships, but equally, this can be overstated. 

Murdoch remains a non-executive board member of News Corp, and his personal relationship with local News Limited management is tight. As a former CEO of the publishing group, Murdoch was instrumental in the group’s investment in online media in the early to mid-1990s. His affinity with digital media is strong, and it is more than likely Murdoch will set a challenge for local DMG management to have online revenues equal the group’s broadcasting revenues within two to three years.

For DMG’s competitors, the doomsday scenario is to see the Nova and Vega networks develop some level of commercial collaboration with News Limited mastheads in each capital city. The possibility of a Nova-MySpace joint initiative shouldn’t be dismissed either. From Fairfax Media’s perspective, the Illyria-DMG Radio Australia deal will be problematic for both its print and radio businesses.

While Australia’s largest commercial radio network, Austereo, maintains a very strong lead on DMG across all audiences, the shake-up and revitalisation of DMG is an opportunity to recalibrate a number of factors, two of which include its management structure, following CEO Michael Anderson’s resignation this year, and the group’s priorities with regards to digital media.

In terms of online audiences for radio, Austereo is a clear number one, driven obviously by larger radio audiences, but equally by first-mover tactics to produce new digital brands like the highly recognisable RADAR station, and the soon-to-be released, Hot30 Jelly, which introduces near real-time listener programming.

Averaging close to 1m unique browsers a month, Austereo’s digital business captures an audience almost three times the size of DMG’s online channels. Yet with youth brands, particularly FMCG and restaurant groups, hungry (excuse the pun) for credible digital media options targeting a sub-18 market,  this is not a situation DMG can afford to tolerate for much longer, certainly not under Murdoch’s watch.

Once the hand shaking and back-slapping are over, Murdoch will be busy pitching the new DMG and its vision to media buyers as a near perfect hybrid of mainstream and digital media reaching millions of young Australians, even when very few have no intention of purchasing a digital radio!

Illyria may have taken its time to lock down a substantial media asset, but given the growth potential for commercial radio overall, even Austereo would agree the purchase was astute.

Can Seek Ever Be Put Out Of A Job?

It’s time for the major publishers to get serious about challenging the market’s number one in online employment.

By most accounts, Seek has a significant market lead (in terms of eyeballs/unique browsers) over both MyCareer and CareerOne. In fact, the ratio is approximately 2:1 in favour of Seek against its nearest rival. No amount of outdoor advertising will close that gap.

So the call is - no more bus signage, no more cute one liners, no more editorial about job tips. Brand success (read: market share) depends on the value derived by job seekers from the search experience itself - and that does not necessarily have to mean finding the most comprehensive listings, or the right position everytime.

The argument is: develop a unique search experience, create word-of-mouth (WOM) testimonials, build a listings database which duplicates the number one site, then continue to innovate around search functionality and meta-data classification to pull away into first position. Easy.

But that positive grass roots momentum requires significant power to ramp up. In other words, to differentiate the service and stimulate WOM (including its electronic version) requires a radical re-think of the classifieds model, in particular, how listings are categorised (the meta-data used to support classifications) and how the results are displayed to searchers.

The fundamental issue for both News and Fairfax is to:

a) either accept the status quo, and reap the rewards commensurate with being a number 2 and 3 indefinitely;

b) accept that ranking third in a market of three is unsustainable, and fold-in the database with number two through a licensing model, or to close completely;

c) take the risk and radically re-define the whole concept of classifieds as an advertising medium.

What does “radically re-define” mean?

It means initially focusing on three key changes which alter the vanilla search templates common across all employment sites. It also means giving recruiters and employers more options to differentiate their employment advertisements using meta-data and streaming techniques.

These ‘rules’ are: visualisation, video and vector.

a) Visualisation

Employment ads should be colour coded to denote variables such as the preferred personality of candidates, the company’s culture, even the seniority or reporting lines associated with the position;

b)Video streaming

Recruiters should be given this option to run 30 or 60-sec streams on executive level positions. Overview of workplace, personnel and presented by the ‘boss’. Pre-roll ads could be the property of either the recruiter or publisher.

c) Vector

A subjective assessment of the business’s prospects, as well as the opportunities for career progression in the organisation.

Innovation in data management, including more comprehensive contextual and meta-data on each position, requires both publishers and recruiters to do more than simply slap up a job description, with their dubious descriptions and generic phrases. Instead, candidates now have visual queues on both the employer and the role itself, assisting to pre-qualify candidates even further as well as improving the depth of job data.

For too long the competitive employment space has been subjected to a volume game, where the database with the most employment opportunties swayed the active job seeker to make their site number one. With innovations such as visualisation, video and vectors, pllayers two and three have the opportunity to balance this numbers game with qualitative functions which give real value back to both the candidate and recruiter.

That’s how the race for number one can be won by number two in the medium-term.

Mobile: Beyond the Advertising Option (Part 1.)

The former Czechoslovakia had its velvet revolution, when the citizenry rose up and ‘gently’ swept the old regime into the dust bin. By comparison, this so-called mobile revolution, with its expectation of providing another billion-dollar advertising opportunity, has been like encouraging social change using the tactic of house-to-house fighting!

I believe the third screen is an increasingly important medium, and will have a role (though not a dominant one) to play in how we consume media content.

More immediately, mobile technology, particularly mobile broadband, has an exciting role to play in linking customer and sales data with incentive programs, better informing consumers about the location and extent of retail offerings, as well as empowering individuals to impact the sales dynamic through collaborative efforts.

In the context of retail (including retail property operators), all roads lead to three dominant technology plays. These include data collection and mining, wireless applications and customer behavioural targeting; the latter encompassing online, wireless and the individual’s physical environment. Conceptually, these technologies, and subsequent implementation across retail outlets and complexes, will be guided by the following principles:

a) Providing the consumer with almost ‘perfect’ knowledge about their shopping environment;

b) Optimising the retail experience so that there are cost savings associated with economies of scale and search, and

c) Community integration, where like-minded consumers are free to congregate in a digital forum to collaborate on their user experiences, including feedback on services and products.

Let’s take ‘Perfect Knowledge’ first.

Empowering the customer with greater knowledge about their retail environment is consistent with supporting the business goals of more regular patronage, higher share-of-wallet, and a wider spread of that spend across multiple retail outlets.

For example, being alerted about a 25% vacancy rate in the centre’s car park (with most vacancies on level 3, for example) via SMS would most likely prompt customers to schedule a drive to their shopping centre when the convenience factor was relatively high.

Or, informing customers about exactly where and when every discount sale was occurring as they walked through the front doors of their department store or local shopping centre – again illustrating how ‘knowledge’ facilitates and prolongs the transaction process. With an appropriate level of innovation, a customer’s heightened awareness of the activity associated with their retail experience inevitably leads to higher satisfaction levels more often.

A brief hello…now get back to work.

The remit of this blog is to be succinct, entertaining and insightful (SES)…oh, and never get defensive about the use of acronyms.

Being  late-bloomer in most things, the blogging dynamic has been well known to me for many years, but my participation has been tempered in the past by a degree of cynicism and not much confidence that others would pay the time to speed-read my rants. What’s another opinion worth in a sea of self-serving, egotistical and often brilliant contributions?

But like the Internet itself, change in one’s own perspective can happen rapidly when age brings a degree of humility to the table.  At the risk of churning stomachs with flowery prose, I’m besotted, even enamoured with this media of blogging.  While my cup could runeth over, I’ll spare you the time. All I’ll say is that I have a responsibility to ensure my contribution to public discourse enhances the agenda-setting power of this media and the reputation of everyone associated with it.