The Australian commercial radio industry reported an improvement in metropolitan advertising revenue to $168.525 million in the December quarter, following the re-opening of Victoria and a slight improvement in business conditions.
 

The Australian metropolitan commercial radio audience grew by 2% to nearly 11.1 million listeners in 2020, in a year dominated by COVID-19 which saw the number of people listening at home jump by eight per cent to 6.4 million.
 
Commercial Radio Australia’s annual listening summary, based on an average of the five official GfK radio surveys conducted in 2020, shows radio’s cumulative audience reached a record high and has climbed by 10% over the past five years.
 

BMF’s Great Fresh Food Migration campaign for ALDI Australia has won Round 4 of the Siren Awards for radio advertising.
 
The whimsical campaign, by creatives Roy Leibowitz and Chris Wilson, imagines the sound of fresh produce migrating to the supermarket to remind consumers the products are Australian-grown and affordable.
 

The commercial radio industry has commissioned GfK to undertake a fourth annual summer listening survey to examine how consumers engage with media and radio over the holiday season.
 
The survey will cover consumers in both metropolitan and regional Australia and will look into how and why audiences stay connected over the warmer months.
 

Thursday is the most popular day of the week to stream or download podcasts, and radio show catch-ups followed by true crime were the most popular categories in 2020, according to insights from the Australian Podcast Ranker, released today by CRA and Triton Digital.
 
Publishers in the ranker delivered more than 420.8 million podcast live streams or downloads from January to the end of November.
 

Creative agency Meerkats has won Round 3 of the 2021 Siren Awards, being awarded the overall win for the campaign ‘Beautiful Ningaloo’ for conservation initiative Project Ningaloo, which swept all three categories.

Commercial Radio Australia is aiming to transform the way audio advertising is bought and sold with the roll out of the briefings module of RadioMATRIX in two weeks time.

RadioMATRIX allows media buyers to connect with every commercial station on one powerful platform.
 
The briefings module, developed in conjunction with radio networks and media agencies, provides templates and tools that will drastically reduce the time it takes to create a brief. What once took hours can now be done in minutes.

The effect of the current pandemic on station revenue continues to bite with the latest figures from Deloitte showing a drop of over $51 million in the September quarter.

WorldDAB and Asia Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) are presenting a free DAB+ technical webinar series on Digital Radio Technology-Implementation and Rollout from 20-23 October.