ARN told the stock exchange this morning that Managing Director and CEO Ciaran Davis would step down by the end of this year, making way for his successor Michael Stephenson to lead the company from 2026 onwards.
Ciaran was born in Ireland and worked in radio there before leaving to begin an international career that took him to Europe and the Middle East, before coming to Australia to lead ARN.
His first venture into an executive role came in 2003 when he was marketing manager at Dublin’s 98FM. The Chief Executive of the company resigned to join a rival independent commercial station and Ciaran stepped into the C-Suite as CEO of 98fm after introducing some innovative promotions to Ireland, such as The Fugutive. The following year he got into hot water when the station ran a 2 Strangers and a Wedding promotion. As happened in many other countries where that promotion was run, the church objected to the promotion, registering its view that marriage was a sacred institution, not a suitable topic for a radio promotion. Of course the coverage helped promote the station and increase listeners.
After 98FM, Ciaran joined the Irish commercial radio company Communicorp and worked across Europe and the Middle East for Communicorp radio stations.
When Bob Longwell left the Australian Radio Network in 2009, the company conducted an international search for a new CEO and selected Ciaran Davis, who came to Australia in January 2010 to take up the job.
At the time, we reported that Ciaran “joined ARN from Communicorp, a leading international commercial broadcaster operating one of eastern and central Europe’s largest independent radio groups… with 44 national, regional and local radio stations in Ireland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Ukraine and Jordan, broadcasting to over 13 million people weekly in a range of formats, languages and music genres.”
Ciaran’s job immediately before joining ARN was as Communicorp group’s commercial director, where he has been responsible for all operational and commercial aspects of the group’s radio assets.
Ciaran’s big coup for ARN came when he poached Kyle and Jackie O from 2Day FM to ARN and changed the Mix 106.5 station name to KIIS. Kyle and Jackie’s massive audience followed them to the new station and ARN was in an expansionary mode. Ciaran’s ability to take strategic risks paid off in this and other business decisions. Any CEO also needs the ability to convince the company board of business opportunities, and Ciaran demonstrated this many times with the signing of Christian O’Connell, the partnership with iHeartRadio, the acquisition of Grant Broadcasters and various other business deals.
In recent years, ARN has been rocked with criticism of Kyle and Jackie O’s Melbourne expansion, faced the Covid advertising downturn, a falling share price, a failed merger bid for SCA and the recent round of redundancies, which has seen an outpouring of anger mostly directed at Ciaran.
The CEO of a public media company is always squeezed between the needs of the shareholders, the risk appetite of the board, the daily share price, the expectations of staff, the requirements of advertisers and the changing political and social undercurrents in society. It’s a balancing act.
As radio businesses reinvent themselves, one of ARN’s most recent initiatives has been the company’s championing of new advertising and audience initiatives for the modern digital audio commercial broadcast environment.
In an internal staff email today, Ciaran Davis said the job has been “the privilege of his career” and that together the company has “achieved so much.”
“None of this would have been possible without your support, hard work, creativity and commitment. For that, I am sincerely grateful…
“ARN is a truly special company, and it’s been an honour to lead it.”
Ciaran Davis has ridden the ups and downs of the industry for 15 years and has made his mark on Australian radio.
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