It’s not often that a change in a station’s Breakfast show brings the type of immediate results that 4BC has reaped by hiring the former 4KQ Breakfast team.
In Survey 3, 4BC Breakfast with Neil Breen had slowly risen to a respectable 7.5 share but the station, as a whole, was struggling on a 5.8.
By Survey 4, released July 5, things were looking up. Breakfast had risen by 0.5 to an 8.0 share and the station followed suit, also gaining 0.5 to reach a 6.3 share, overall.
A lot of hard work had gone into that survey, yet just six days later, Nine Radio management was prepared to put all that at risk by not only changing the single presenter Breakfast to a three person team but changing the all talk format to include a generous helping of music.
With the retiring of the venerable 4KQ brand and its Pure Gold format to the all sport format of it’s purchaser Sports Entertainment Network (SEN) most of KQ’s long-term staff including the Brekky team of Laurel Edwards, Gary Clare and Mark Hine, found themselves jobless. But not for long. They were snapped up by 4BC and on-air by 5:30am on July 11.
The result in yesterday’s GFK Survey 5 was a 10.1 share in Breakfast and an overall share of 7.7 for the station.
“Very, very, very pleased with the 4BC figures today,” says a beaming Head of Content, Greg Byrnes. “Best breakfast cume we’ve had on 4BC ever! It’s up 47% up on last survey.”
“The program is sounding good. It’s very different from Neil (Breen’s)breakfast program. But Neil sounds fantastic on Drive. And it’s interesting that across the board there’s been increases in Ray Hadley’s show and a really healthy increase in afternoons.”
They’re all working particularly hard up there (in Brisbane) and it’s results like today that I’m really pleased for them because I know there’s been a lot of work going on and when they get a result like today it fills them with confidence as off we head to Survey 6 and beyond.”
Still, with little time to do in-depth research it was a risky proposition – perhaps mitigated by the fact that many of those still listening to KQ on the AM band found it easier to find 4BC than if they were more used to FM.
“I think the key word is Heritage,” says Byrnes. Whether it’s a Heritage Radio program on a Heritage radio station, it’s a pretty good place to start from. And if you look at the 3AW breakfast show, it’s not your traditional news talk program and it has rated very well for decades.
“So, we looked at the pros and cons and thought it was the right direction to go in. Having spoken to the team, Laurel, Gary and Mark, were certainly committed to a long term. They felt they had more to prove, and more to say and more to entertain. Even at this relatively early stage, today’s results are very encouraging.”
Peter Saxon