As radio’s audiences are getting older, how do you successfully engage with the younger, future audiences?

On day 2 of Radiodays Asia, Anna Dixon shared some of the work and experiments focused on younger audiences that has been explored by the ABC Innovation Lab.

Teens and tweens remember what they watched in their childhood and they think about what their parents watched, but one of the things that was found in this study of younger audiences, is that in the main, this younger audience has no real connection to the ABC.

By 2032 two-thirds of the Australian population will be made up of Gen Z, Millennials and Alpha.

Teens and tweens care more about the content than the publisher. They rely on the algorithms of their social media feeds to give them the content they like, and this means they are less likely to undertake their own discovery for new content.

It also means that if content providers are not already in their feeds, they are unlikely to get there.

The under 30’s are also less likely to recall media brands and more likely to remember talent and influencers.

The ABC looked at the explosion of TikTok and, along with the establishment of the Talent Fund, were able to employ young new diverse talent to work on their 3^rd party platforms.

TikTok has provided the ABC with a cost-effective way of testing a broad range of content on the one account, and this has allowed different teams within to organisation to create content, test it and see what works and what should be discarded.

Looking at what is so enticing about TikTok, Anna says what stood out is “…that they have a huge range and variety, short modular segments, a continuous flow of content and they serve a unique set of content to each person.”

 The ABC has now added a new audio product, ABC Streams, and like TikTok, it is a collection of skippable short ABC Podcasts and radio segments of between 1-3 minutes.

This allows listeners to access a broad range of topics in a small amount of time while also allowing for links to longer versions of podcasts and radio segments.

Anna’s broad takeaways from what the ABC has learnt about this young emerging audience are

• They love video. How can you create video to support your audio
• Don’t wait for them to come to you, go to where they are
• How can you leverage influencers? Think about what the benefits are for them to work with you
• Create a model that suits experimentation, and allows things to be abandoned when they don’t work.