ABC Radio is more efficient now than it has ever been, according to Radio Director Kate Dundas, who shared some statistics at the Australian Broadcasting Summit. “In 1985 we had two national radio networks, local capital city stations and about 30 regional stations. In 2012 ABC Radio has 4 national networks, the same number of capital city stations and over 50 regional stations, plus digital radio stations and many websites. In 2012 there are 240 fewer staff servicing all these outlets than there was in 1985.”

“Resources, or the lack of them, has been a key driver for us to improve our efficiency… It has been an enforced way of building innovation.”

Quoting historical figures, Dundas said the proportion of the population listening to radio is still about the same as in the past, but because of competition from so many other media these days, time spent listening has decreased.

As the media landscape changes, Dundas believes one of radio’s enduring strengths is as a multi-tasking medium. “You can garden with the radio, you can drive, you multi-task with radio more than with other media.”

ABC research commissioned in 2012 showed that Australians consumed about 8.3 billion hours of ABC content. Of that, Aussies consumed more ABC Radio (4.66 billion hours) than ABC Television (3.49 billion hours).

Echoing a similar message to other speakers at the Summit, Dundas sees smart phones as the future. “Smart phones and Apps put radio back in people’s pockets. Apps are the future.” She also spoke about how ABC Open producers are teaching people all over regional Australia how to use smart phones and multi-media devices to tell their own stories through ABC Open, an initiative of the Radio Division.

ABC Radio’s two main apps, Unearthed and Triple J, have about 75,000 regular users. Regular users are an important measurement statistic for Apps. The ABC’s regular users are about 20% of those who have downloaded the Apps. That statistic compares with Sydney Morning Herald’s App, where about 5% of those who downloaded it become regular users

In Kate Dundas’ experience the key drivers to innovation in ABC Radio are:

• Audience behaviours
• Resources – the lack of them
• Disruptive technologies
• Risk taking
• Clarity of purpose
• Tech change –production and platform
• thinking in a non linear way
• redefining what radio is – a slow burning platform
• competition

Her full presentation is below.

Radio listening

All media organisations in this room face challenges in this digital and convergent age – mostly through fragmentation of audiences.

In 2004, the five cap city survey figures showed that 94.7% of Australians aged 10 or over were tuning in weekly, for an average 22 hours eighteen.

In 2011, an almost identical 94.6% of the 10+ population listened to the radio each week – but the average time they spent listening has dropped to 19 hours and 10 minutes.

The competition for people’s time is fierce but the notion that people are leaving the medium just doesn’t hold up. One of the advantages for us is that we are the multi-tasking medium – you can do all manner of things while listening to the radio – including driving and walking. I also think that Australian radio – across the industry – is diverse and high quality.

Public obligations in a multiplatform age

The ABC’s challenge is to find a path between attracting large audiences – be a service provider “for all Australians”, while fulfilling both niche and broad Charter obligations around news, education, arts etc and the even broader idea of ‘the public good’. 

Our radio services are 80 years old.  The ABC as a whole, with the advent of television and then online services, has a long history as a cross-platform broadcaster which I believe has given it a big kick start into the convergent age.

ABC content is consumed across a range of platforms and formats – broader than any other organisation: television, radio, online, magazines, concerts; recorded music, DVDs, podcasts, streams – on home computers and mobile devices – analogue and digital; through apps, social media and more.

And within the Corporation, ABC Radio itself is now a cross-platform division, with a strong and growing presence on ALL of these platforms.

Our core business remains, of course, our radio programs which go out 24/7 from our local and national networks.

The challenge of measurement

One of our greatest challenges in a multiplatform world is metrics – how do we measure our success – or otherwise – traditional ratings aren’t enough anymore. We think we need to be innovative around measurement and last year we began that process.

We started last year with the ABC commissioning research into new ways of measuring and aggregating consumption. Using available, hard data – it was determined that in 2010, Australians consumed 8.3 billion hours of ABC content across the three major platforms of television, radio and online. In my world where television is the hungry beast – I loved the fact Australians consumed more hours of ABC Radio than television – 4.66 billion hours of ABC Radio across the country.

The challenge of growth and conscious innovation

One reason radio has held its own in this digital age has been through continuous innovation. In ABC Radio’s case -we have literally extended ourselves and our services over and over again with diminishing resources in real terms. This requires reinvention and non-linear thinking, risk taking and clarity of purpose.

In 1985, ABC Radio consisted of 2 national networks – Radio National and ABC FM; double jay in Sydney only; our local metropolitan radio stations and 34 regional stations.   We now have 4 national networks with the addition of triple j and ABC NewsRadio; our metro stations; 51 regional radio stations; 6 new digital only radio services; and over 100 websites. We have fewer staff today than we had in 1985.

This kind of systemic change, driven in part by the availability of resources but in large measure by audience behaviours and technology change, requires new ways of thinking and working.  In my experience innovation doesn’t just happen. You have to facilitate it – in our case we have made some hard decisions, we diverted funds from traditional activities and found ways of pulling people together into creative partnerships.

For example until 2009, ABC Radio maintained a very traditional radio structure, with everything grafted on to the sides of the networks. As part of a 3 year strategic plan we made a decision to pull all staff working primarily on new media out of their home networks and into one centralised radio multiplatform department – to harness the energy and resources of a bigger group of online specialists – to professionalise what had in essence been a series of cottage industries. This allowed R&D to occur in a very focussed way and priorities to be set for our online activities.

We also consciously sought to innovate. We reviewed our budget from top to bottom and I pulled money out of the dark corners of the Radio Division budget and established a Content Development fund within the new Radio Multiplatform area.

The fund enables our people to develop and pitch new projects each year. They must be tied to the goals in our strategic plan – specifically to broaden our multiplatform capability, align content and platforms for maximum audience engagement; and develop the skills of our content makers.

River Stories was funded in this way http://open.abc.net.au/projects/one-on-one-river-stories-16sm5im it is a journey down the great Hunter River – on radio, online, on ABC Open and on ABC TV. When our Newcastle Station Manager pitched the idea of creating a visual component to a radio series, we put a team together, to create beautiful multiplatform content. The outcome was a Local Radio series featured in morning programs; 13 short video stories on 1233 ABC Newcastle’s website and for broadcast on ABC TV this year.   ABC Open worked in with the team by setting up digital workshops for local communities along the river to create their own stories and upload onto the site. 

ABC Open – Radio’s biggest online project

ABC Open was launched in September 2010 and is our biggest online project.  People have sometimes asked me why it belongs to ABC Radio, when only a smallish part of its content can be played on the air. The answer is that it builds on our 80 years of experience in regional Australia, working with communities and helping them to tell their own stories through reporting and talkback. 

Working in halls, libraries, schools and community centres in country towns, the Open producers have taught people how to take, edit, manage and store digital photographs, to record and edit sound, to shoot video, to use Facebook and to generally conquer their fear of new technologies.

ABC Open gives ordinary people the necessary skills to tell their own stories and then provides them with a national audience for their work.

The value of this work was shown most fully in the recent Aftermath project. The first few months of 2011 saw Australia experience some of the worst natural disasters on record.

Through photos, videos and intensely personal blog posts, Aftermath followed the stories of 6 people as they tried to rebuild their lives and their towns. This is an example of one of those stories http://open.abc.net.au/projects/aftermath-08vh8ac/collections/people-the-mahon-family-69yk8ki

There was of course an audio edit of this story, and the others, played on our radio stations.  It was also possible for anyone affected by a disaster to upload their own stories onto the site and make their own contribution to a bigger story of resilience and recovery. To date there have been more than 1200 contributions to the Aftermath project.

Digital Radio

The other great gift to ABC Radio and the industry more widely in terms of promoting innovation has been the introduction of digital radio.  As with all major broadcasters, the ABC is simulcasting all its analogue radio services.  However, one of the main attractions of digital radio for audiences is access to new, different and compelling content. And we definitely want to make it for them.

In our digital-only radio services, we’ve focussed on a number of things:

• distinctive content and particularly Australian content,
• unbundling content for discrete delivery which otherwise competes for airtime on our analogue services
• leveraging existing content and ensuring efficient production processes.

The ability to bundle and unbundle content across the digital platform has provided us with the kind of flexibility we have craved for years to suit different audience needs. NewsRadio without Parliament on digital, our local radio stations without sport because we have ABC Grandstand digital; ABC Classic FM without jazz programs because we have ABC Jazz; etc

Of our six new services, four are music and have extensive interactive websites as part of the full digital experience. This was an early strategic decision for all our digital radio services. We really are platform agnostic – we want people to listen to us in any way they can.  I don’t see online listening as a threat to digital radio. 11% of Americans now listen to the radio exclusively online.  In Australia listening to radio on digital radios is now almost double that of people listening online. I think this is simply because, unlike the Americans, we do have a superior platform in DAB+ – but we need to be in every game we can.

Another early strategic decision was to resist the temptation to use up all our digital channels with set formats. I wanted to keep one aside specifically to innovate – new formats; events coverage; content overflow; experiments.

ABC Extra is an occasional service or “pop-up station” used mostly for special event broadcasts.  They might be for a day or several weeks and have included such things as the 40th anniversaries of the 1969 moon landing and the Woodstock music festival, coverage of the Melbourne International Arts Festival and the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Indigenous programming for NAIDOC Week, national Anzac Day coverage and Aus Music Month. We also used ABC Extra to fully test the format of our newest digital radio station triplejunearthed before launch.

Our other developing station is ABC Grandstand Digital which capitalises on ABC Radio’s strength in sports broadcasting. Grandstand is our primary digital destination for radio sport, broadcasting all major ABC sports coverage as well as additional sport not found on ABC Local Radio, such as uninterrupted international cricket, A League soccer, etc. We don’t have the resources for a fully fledged sports station yet and have taken the strategic decision to build one over time with more coverage as well as sports current affairs and analysis.

Earlier this month we added a Breakfast program, with Francis Leach, to ABC Grandstand.  It not only carries coverage and results – but also analysis, breaking stories and interviews with key players (no pun intended.) It airs from 6-10am Friday through Monday.

The age of apps

One of the big innovations for us and other broadcasters has been the introduction of smartphones and apps. In my view the advent of the app changes the game again – and puts radio back in people’s pockets where it belongs.

ABC Radio prioritised young people in terms of our first apps. Two years ago we launched the enormously successful triplejunearthed app for iPhone which took number 1 spot in iTunes music apps in its first 3 weeks and in September last year we launched the triple j app – the mother-brand if you like.

The triple j iphone app to date has had 377,000 downloads, 75,000 regular users and 8.1million sessions. It has more regular users that the ABC app. It’s worth noting that the percentage of regular users compared to downloads is about 20%. This is a great number. By comparison the SMH & Age iPhone apps, which I think are really terrific, have a figure of about 5%.

Of course there are challenges around this – data plans etc means we are no longer free to air – and that is something to think about. It is also costly for us as broadcasters in terms of capacity – every new online user streaming our services costs. Regardless – apps are part of radio’s future and are a truly disruptive and innovative path forward for us.

Ever interactive

The other parts of the user experience which we believe is important for radio are the interactive aspects. It used to be just talkback and letters and phone calls to the station – now it’s the whole world of social media and third party platform activity – reinforcing the brand, reaching out in new ways to acquire different audiences. Our most sophisticated exponent of the “be on any device anywhere at any time” is triple j – which I believe has led the way in the industry integrating radio and new media seamlessly for years now. So – to give you a feel for the universe which triple j now operates in:

Facebook – 191,947 fans in 2011 now 465,178 fans. An increase of 143% from June 2010

Twitter – 23,000 followers in 2011; now 87,448 followers. An increase of 280% from June 2010

triple j website – averages 957,530 visitors a month – up 37.5% from last year.  However in January this year – Hottest 100 month – there were over 2 million visitors to the triple j website

H100 votes – 1,378,869 votes in H100 2011 – an increase of 13% from last year.

triple j Unearthed site:  

34,593 Artists have uploaded their music

75,440 tracks on the site

300,405 registered users

5,939,129 downloads

18,462,634 streams

That’s an extraordinary amount of activity and engagement with a large audience of triple j fans, musicians and music lovers.

Reinventing traditional radio

It may seem relatively easy to innovate with brand new properties like digital radio, so I also wanted to talk a little about being innovative with ABC Radio’s oldest network, Radio National. It has from its beginnings in 1932 been the very epitome of old-style public sector – learned, specialist broadcasting. A true heritage brand. It’s content is unique in the radio industry and it’s incredibly important to the ABC. And you touch it at your peril.

As you may know, RN has been thoroughly refreshed and relaunched this year. 9 programs were taken off the schedule, 19 were either added or substantially altered. 13 were subject to ‘minor changes’, 23 to schedule changes and 17 to presentation changes. Some of these figures overlap by the way. In the end, only 8 shows from the old schedule were completely unaffected.

The point of the changes was not that Radio National was broken. It’s audience was, on the surface, remarkably steady – but it was growing older and new listeners were not attracted to it. We needed to build the next generation. In order to secure its future we had to identify and engage with the 40+ demographic who would relish this unique kind of station. 

And one of the things which gave us heart that there was – is – a younger audience for the intellectual and cultural content of Radio National has been the success of its podcasts.  In 2011, there were 63.9 million downloads of ABC Radio programs – of those more than 24 million were Radio National programs.

In years gone by – in simpler times – we would have refreshed a network by just changing its programming and maybe giving it a new logo. In 2012 we did that but we also developed a comprehensive social media strategy for the network as a whole, and each of the program elements, overhauled the visual brand identity as well as the on-air imaging and redesigned the website. The radio station is like the centre of a small solar system now – not a single star.

This is an example of the kind of approach to RN content now. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/downloadthisshow/

Securing the future

And now from the reinvention of our oldest radio asset to our newest radio asset. Unearthed is triple j’s award-winning initiative for discovering and sharing the best new Australian music. When Unearthed was first established as a competition in 1995 aspiring musicians would send cassettes of their music into the triple j studios, hoping to attract the attention of producers and be played on the radio.

Like the Hottest 100, Unearthed is a sub brand of triple j which we have consciously invested in and used technology to drive innovation. In 2006 we gave it a new lease of life through establishing a sophisticated website where unsigned artists are able to upload their work and expose it not only to the station, but to a growing community of fellow musicians and fans registered on the site.

Unearthed is the largest user-generated music site in the world. Streams from the unearthed site average 1 million per month.

In October last year, triple j Unearthed was launched as a digital-only radio station.  It can also be heard online in regional Australia, which is important because more than 30% of all music on Unearthed is made outside of the capital cities. It has a target demographic of 16-26.

triple j Unearthed draws exclusively from the Unearthed website and is the only station on the digital dial to play 100% Australian music. This sums it up better than I can: http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/unearthed/  

So – in summary – we see innovation as constant, cross platform, strategic and audience centric.  We see innovation as being at the heart of radio and radio as being at the heart of innovation.  Thank you.