Credit: Amol Tyagi via Unsplash
ARN Media, with a restructured sales focus on data and how advertisers use that to reach consumers, now has a clear runway to focus on digital audio.
The broadcaster has simplified its operating model, with a restructured sales team, already stripping out $35 million of $40 million in planned costs and 240 going from headcount.
Underlying costs dropped by 5% or $6.6 million in the half year to June and net debt is down 12% to $78 million.
“We had a very successful radio sales team,” CEO Ciaran Davis told AdNews. “And it would have been easy to not make any changes.
“We needed to change the capability that we had in the business. We needed to focus on a lot more digital sales, on attribution modelling, on data scientists and really taking advantage of the lot of data that we have in the business, … because that is what advertisers demand today.”
Part of that change was bringing in Michael Stevenson, former head of sales at Nine Entertainment, as COO, a digital leader.
In the half year update, ARN’s digital audio revenue was up 21% to $15.4 million, representing 9% of revenue and the company wants more.
“The market for digital audio in the next two to three to four years is very positive,” Davis told AdNews.
“We see growth, which not many media sectors can claim, driven by digital audio, with radio still being a very strong foundation.
“Forty-two per cent of our total audience now consumes their content with us on a digital platform, yet it only accounts for about 10% of our revenue.
“And it's clear people are listening, obviously to more podcasts, but to live radio in digital formats and that presents both content opportunities but also monetisation opportunities.”
Davis described the new sales focus as being about targeting capabilities, turning around successful radio operations to build a simplified structure that's capable of creating content in multiple platforms and distributing it and then monetising it.
“It's about understanding our first party data, understanding how clean rooms work, analysing partnerships with other data providers and providing real attribution models and digital solutions that work for advertisers,” he said
“What we're building is a total audio approach to how we create content, how we distribute content and how we monetise content.
“And that means starting with radio, but moving into podcasts, into live streaming, into data partnerships and having a total audio sphere approach to how we create and distribute and monetise that content.”
A slide from the half year results presentation:
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