Apart from the seismic shift in audience from 2Day-FM to KIIS, the rest of the Sydney market has remained relatively stable from Survey 8 last year to Survey 2 last week. But in Melbourne where there’s been more personnel changes in major shifts, things aren’t quite as clear cut.
The chart below compares the last of the Nielsen Surveys for Melbourne from December 2013 (blue figures) to the second of the GfK surveys (orange figures). The first two columns compare overall share (10+; 5:30am – Midnight; Mon-Sun) while the next two columns compare breakfast shows.
Proving the point that Breakfast is a station’s most important shift, in every instance where breakfast is up, the station is up overall and down where breakfast is down.
But what has the pundits confounded is which shows are up and which are down. It was widely expected that those stations where long term heritage breakfast shows had signed off would struggle to find an audience as listeners flocked to more established shows.
That notion worked at treat for Brig and Lehmo at GOLD and Chrissie and Jane at MIX 101.1 which both enjoyed healthy gains. But the show voted most likely to succeed before the first GfK survey came out, Triple M’s Hot Breakfast with Eddie McGuire, has gone the other way losing 1.9 share points, taking it from a clear FM market leader to equal number one with Nova 100’s new team of Meshel and Tommy who’ve lost just 1.0 in share from the 8.4 that their predecessors Hughesy and Kate left them.
Better news for SCA is that in third FM place, just 0.2 behind Triple M and Nova breakfast, sits FOX-FM’s Fifi and Dave who’ve also managed to hang on to most of what Matt and Jo had left them in breakfast.
By comparison, 3AW with the longest standing breakfast team of all, Ross Stevenson and John Burns had one of it’s worst results for yonks dropping an eye-popping 2.4 to a 16.3 share. While that’s still a winning result, (Alan Jones has 15.5) coupled with an even bigger dip in Neil Mitchell’s mornings, it was enough to drag the station down to second place behind the ABC.
On the other hand its Fairfax sister Magic 1278 added 2.2 since December 2013 to put it on a 6.2 share overall with a 5.0 in breakfast, not far behind the highly fancied smoothfm.
All three commercial FM Content heavyweights agree Melbourne is a highly competitive market where the audience is on the move.
ARN’s Duncan Campbell says, “I think there’s a lot of churn going on in the market. FOX had a very active survey as did Nova. I think that’s creating audience movement as people try and figure out which station they want to ultimately settle on.
“And there’s a lot of activity going on. GOLD has repositioned itself slightly with its music. It’s very much a 80’s station flavoured with 90s and 70s making it a more contemporary sound. MIX is creating some very good content out of breakfast at the moment.”
Nova Entertainment’s Paul Jackson says, “There are some very good stations in Melbourne. Nova, smooth, Triple M, Gold, Mix, Fox are all very close. Any one on any given day can win. You’ve got to be damned good in Melbourne. Its never been tighter and there are so new shows to choose from.
“Nova’s got a huge cume number at 911,000 and a breakfast show that we really believe in and are very proud of and a team down there that we think can keep marching forward.”
SCA’s Craig Bruce says, “Melbourne is tight, no question about that. You’ve got all six FM stations within striking distance of each other. I think FOX and Nova are going to trade positions across the course of the next 12 months. Both have new breakfast shows . Both of those shows are pretty good.
“Meshel and Tommy are very talented. Fifi and Dave are a good quality show as well. But they’re re both replacing heritage breakfast shows, so there’s a fair amount of audience churn. Where they’ll land? I think the jury is still out as to how that will play out. But with a cume of over a million were always in the contest.”
Triple M’s Head of Content Mike Fitzpatrick is unperturbed about his Melbourne stations result pointing to the, “phenomenal amounts of money being spent on marketing,” by the other stations in the market, “We’re a unique proposition. Who’s competing against us? Remember Eddie got to number one without a lot of marketing.”
Craig Bruce told us, “I think FOX and Triple M are both off this survey but we are pretty confident in the product on both stations. There’s a few adjustments I think we can make and there’s a few adjustments that we have made from a music perspective that I think will improve our position for Triple M.”
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