ARN is going into the 2025 survey year on the front foot, attempting to explain to listeners the name change of it’s Sydney station from WS to Gold.
It’s all about marketing and name recognition.
In a post on the WSFM, now Gold, website Jenna Benson writes:
By now, you’ve probably noticed that WSFM is now GOLD.
But… why?!
The short answer:
It describes the music we play.
We play great songs, every single one of them is GOLD.
The slightly longer answer:
As proud as we all are of working at WSFM, we’ve found as years have gone by that more and more people were finding our name ‘forgettable’ (ouch)…
After apologising to long-term listeners who know WSFM like a “specialist subject,” Jenna goes on to explain that over the last decade “less and less people were able to recall they listened to a station called WSFM.”
To be honest it was a little heartbreaking.
We say our name all day every day, and year after year our marketing team convinced the boss to give them big budgets to spend on fancy billboard campaigns & TV commercials to try and cut through.
To be honest, they spent an eye watering amount of money, but still thousands of people couldn’t remember they listened to WSFM when asked.
So we’re hanging up the W and the S, and kicking off 2025 with a new name, Sydney’s Gold 101.7.
She reassures the listeners that the personalities are still the same and asks them to “come along for the ride.”
As part of the promotion for the new name, ARN is placing outdoor ads in strategic locations.
The first is on the M4 motorway heading towards Blacktown.
Whether intentional or just coincidence, the billboard is at the Prospect Highway exit, the very road that the first employees of 2WS would have taken to travel to the old shack that was the first home of Western Sydney’s first radio station.
The station was first located in a temporary fibro building at 2 Leabons Lane Seven Hills (below), and later a purpose built studio complex, nicknamed the Pizza Hut for its pointed roof, at the same location.
2WS Original Buildings (Photos: Blacktown Council)
At the time, all of Sydney’s radio stations were located in the CBD or North Sydney, so western suburbs listeners never really felt they had their own radio station. Several Western Sydney radioinfo readers, who were teenagers in 1978 when the station was launched with a parade through the Main Street of Blacktown, recall feeling that the pop stations of the day they listened to, 2SM and 2UW, played great music but never really connected with them. 2WS changed all that.
Another historical moment in Australian radio history came in 1993 when 2WS got the opportunity to mix it with the fresh new FM music stations after securing a new licence and moving from the AM to the FM band.
2WS converted to FM and made its first broadcast as 2WS-FM on 101.7 MHz on June 1, 1993. FM stations were required to adopt three-letter callsigns, so Graham Mott and his team came up with the idea of registering the licence as 2UUS, which could be said on air “two Double U, S” so that the beloved name recognition would remain. In 2001 it changed its on-air name to WSFM.
The station’s switch over to FM is a famous radio industry case study, showing that the integrity of the call sign was so significant to the western suburbs of Sydney at the time that it had to be retained. Mott and the whole staff were also tasked to visit anyone who had trouble finding and tuning the new FM dial on their radios to help them switch to WSFM. View the TV promotion here.
The strategic gamble ARN is taking is that it can attract new listeners who, as the website post explains, don’t really have any allegiance to the old name, without losing the loyal older listeners. Listeners who were teenagers in the 1970s and remember the significance of the call letters are now in their 60s, but still have plenty of listening years left in them (the average of death for Australians is now 83 years). Time will tell if the strategy works.
Gold101.7 is now located at the North Sydney offices of ARN.
The old ‘Pizza Hut’ studio building is still the headquarters of a radio station, Hope 103.2.
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