Lizzie Young is the new CEO of Commercial Radio and Audio.

She has been quietly listening, learning and developing a strategy for the industry in conjunction with the CRA Board since starting about three months ago.

Her first major public appearance in her new role was at the Australian Commercial Radio Awards where she made reference to her career journey on stage with Communications Minister Rowland.

From Black Thunder driver, through promotions, marketing, sales and general management, Lizzie Young now brings her Australian and international expertise to the commercial radio industry.

So who is Lizzie Young?

Steve Ahern finds out.

LIZZIE: This is my third time in Australian radio, and fourth time in the radio industry if you include my stint in London. All of that started 25 years ago.

STEVE: Let’s go back to 25 years to Miss Dizzy Lizzie.

LIZZIE: Dizzy Lizzie was my call sign when I was a black thunder driver at B105 in Brisbane where I started in commercial radio.

I’d spent a small stint as an intern in the ABC newsroom after I finished my journalism degree, but then moved swiftly to commercial radio, did some free shifts on the B105 community switchboard and then started driving thunders under the name Dizzy Lizzy, and then became Jamie Dunn and the B105 morning crew’s stunt girl.

STEVE:  What was the most memorable stunt you were sent to do?

LIZZIE: It was the turn of the millennium, we had the year 2000 coming, and you’ll remember that everything was supposedly going to break in the year 2000. So we wanted to do something called Millennium Dream. We kind of got people to tell us what their dream would be for the new millennium and then we would make that dream come true.

There were all the usual things I guess, but for some strange reason, I distinctly remember a little boy wanting to be a fire engine driver. That was his dream.

So there I was with the full array of all the Fireys and all the trucks and the foam being sprayed out and creating a beautiful little memory for a little boy who was very happy with his millennium dream.

In the same year, we had also done the Brisbane Children’s Hospital Appeal and raised tens of millions of dollars and also put on the B105 Star Party – the combination of all those things are what made radio so special.

STEVE: That’s nice. And then what?

LIZZIE: Then I got my first full-time job as Promotions Coordinator at Triple M in Sydney for Club Veg. It was an incredible show back in the early thousands, the year that Sydney had the Olympics. So I moved to Sydney for that role and then stayed here for a little while.

After her time at Triple M, Lizzie went back to Brisbane to rejoin B105 as Promotions Manager. She had the opportunity to move to Perth as Promotions and Marketing Director, but in the end she turned down that job, stayed on the East Coast with Austereo and worked on B2B Marketing. Then she headed overseas to London for seven years.

STEVE: How did you find a job in London?

LIZZIE: I went with another Australian out of the radio industry as well, a woman now by the name of Jane Palfreyman or she was Jane Earnshaw at the time. Today she’s Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer at SBS.

Jane and I had a deal, because we were both in radio, that the first person to find the job on the internet at the internet cafe could apply for it. She had British ancestry [so she could work there], but I only had a working holiday visa, so I was always like, I need to find the job first because I’m going to find it harder to get a job.

Anyway, I found a job. It was for a company called GWR. I applied for it, got through the process and discovered that GWR had lots of Australians in it. People like Seth Clancy, Duncan Campbell, and others that now work here, and Brits who now work here in Australia, like (now Nova CEO) Peter Charlton, for example.

So I got my first job there as a Commercial Programming Controller. I was the glue between all of the programming teams that we had around England and the London group who were effectively the sales house, to bridge the gap between commercial and content.

I arrived on my first day and they were also looking for a Trade Marketing Manager, so fortunately I had my good friend Jane to put straight in.

I stayed there through the merger of GWR with Capital Radio Group into GCAP and did a variety of roles from that commercial programming role through to running agency sales for the merged company, running sales for over 50 stations regionally, Capital FM, XFM and others.

STEVE: Your sales experience there led you to come back to Australia to bring some of that expertise here.

LIZZIE:  Yes, it was at the time when Australia was changing from promotions and marketing teams and delineating between what was Marketing versus what is now generally called Integration or Creative Solutions. I had some of that experience in England because there everything was effectively funded by clients, not the radio stations, so I brought that back and worked at Austereo again out of Sydney when they first launched their Integration team in January 2008.

STEVE: Michael Anderson brought you back.

LIZZIE: Yes. We had met up in London for a chat and talked about what was happening in the UK and then what was going to be happening in Australia, which sounded like a great opportunity. The wonderful Helen Davies was General Manager at the time.

I did a couple of years on that stint. That was when radio really started to change how it dealt with clients to give them a pathway to that great creative that radio can deliver. Radio showed how brands could be a genuine part of it and be a part of the storytelling and the narrative of a radio station show, with the talent and the presenters. That was a really super exciting time.

After three years in that role Lizzie Young switched media, to television, joining what was then the Nine Network, or Channel 9, and staying there for 12 years where she had a variety of different roles, including managing Nine’s operations, post the Nine-Fairfax merger, across Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. She also took on group marketing functions for Nine, finally leaving for a strategic career change to join a social media startup.

LIZZIE: After I left Nine, I wanted to do something completely different, away from corporate media, so I went to a global tech startup in the social media space called WeAre8.

I did two years there. I did it because I wanted something that was global, something that was tech and something that had a bit more of that entrepreneurial bent to it. Working in a global company is fantastic until you realise that you’ve been out of the country for 10 weeks of the last 12 months and you’re working quite a lot of hours and mainly on New York and London time at both ends of the day.

So I was sitting out having a bit of a break and this role came up.

I was interested for a couple of reasons. It felt a bit like a full circle moment coming back to the beginning. I think there is a wonderful opportunity for audio at the moment.

I think about my own experience of the medium. We’ve got the highest share of audience that commercial radio has had in the last decade. In the digital space, we’ve got revenues that can grow exponentially and an incredible opportunity enabled by technology to be even more ubiquitous with our audience and easier to trade for our clients.

The final piece for me really was about the whole industry. CRA is made up of 260 member radio stations owned by various groups or individual proprietors and it’s both metro and regional. For me, the notion of being able to really impact the whole industry to work together for greater scale and realising more opportunity seemed like a great path forward.

STEVE:  I can see the lure. It’s a great industry, and also the world watches Australia because we do have a pretty good track record. The Australian radio industry has continued to be very strong and very successful. I’m sure you’re going to be developing some plans for what comes next.

LIZZIE: Yeah, absolutely, I think you’re right. I had actually forgotten how well regarded the Australian industry is abroad, that’s why so many Aussies work abroad who’ve got a radio background. So I’ve been reminded about that.

There is so much more opportunity in front of us that we haven’t realised yet.

Moving forward we will consider the role that radio plays in the broader audio mix, and we’re focused on podcasting as well.

At the moment, to your point, yes, we’re doing a full review of everything and planning out what our three years will look like for the industry as a whole.

As the year comes to a close, Lizzie Young’s strategic work with her board will culminate in new plans to drive the Australian radio and audio industries forward to their next level. Advertisers will be briefed about those initiatives at the HEARD conference in February.

radioinfo readers will hear more about those plans as soon as they can be announced.