PERSPECTIVES: The natural strength of radio

By Cathy O'Connor, CEO, Nova Entertainment | 12 December 2019
 

This first appeared in the AdNews 2019 Annual edition. Subscribe here for your copy.

From elections, to Royal Commissions to global trade wars, 2019 has been challenging in economic terms.

While the downturn of 2019 has been more prolonged than expected, we will see some marginal improvements into next year with some growth in business confidence now starting to show. Sectors such as automotive and finance which are large spenders in radio, will reset for growth.

Radio will continue to show resilience in the longer term, with advertisers depending on the medium for its large and growing audiences, its tactical flexibility and its natural strength in the growing world of digital audio. 2020 will be another year of strong growth in digital audio, as advertisers increasingly explore formats such as podcasting and new forms of on-demand audio.

We will see increasing sophistication in the measurement of digital audio with initiatives such as the first Podcast Tracker announced in October 2019. Commercial radio will continue to innovate around the measurement of listening, with pilot studies planned for 2020 as supplementary forms of collecting listening data.

I am predicting a continuation of the more united and collegiate approach to radio sector growth, driven by the major operators across metro and regional radio.

Radio has done a good job of taking control of its own destiny though initiatives such as an industry-wide radio station streaming app “Radio App”, automated holdings across the industry to prepare the medium to compete programmatically and podcast ratings, showing radio’s natural strength and leadership in this medium.

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