At Southern Cross Austereo, its half-year results feature a graph that could (and from what we hear, has) mislead investors into thinking it has far more listeners relative to its rivals than it really does… Its sins are two-fold. In purporting to show the relative cumulative reaches of SCA stations at Breakfast (5.30am to 9am) compared to those of major FM rivals Nova and Australian Radio Network, SCA adds the DAB+ figures to its totals. And has handily drawn a red circle around its outstanding performance for emphasis. But for Nova and ARN, it shows only their traditional FM listeners, despite both also having DAB+ listeners.
That, dear readers, is textbook apples and oranges. But it gets worse. At Breakfast, SCA has 183,000 DAB+ listeners. But those 183,000, dwarfed by 2.7 million FM listeners, are nonetheless stacked on top of the FM portion of the chart with a bar a fourth the size of the FM listenership. So not only does SCA not include the DAB+ listeners of its rivals, but it then radically inflates the visual appearance of its own DAB+ scores. There is no axis on this travesty of corporate storytelling.