2UE Breakfast: no longer up against Jones but Jonesy and Amanda

Dicko and Sarah has to be band agnostic: 2UE’s Chris Parker

A funny thing happened in last Tuesday’s Nielsen Survey. Much to the chagrin of the 2UE doomsayers, and there are plenty of them, the station that they’d relegated to AM oblivion enjoyed a small uptick, 0.3. Stranger still, the show that most said could never fly, Breakfast with Dicko and Sarah enjoyed a big uptick, 0.8. 

Okay, it still only brings them to a 4.7 share but they are ahead of 2CH and the current darling of the survey set, smoothfm. Yes, yes, yes, of course, one good survey result does not the next Kyle and Jackie O make but it is enough, at least for the next five weeks till Survey 4, to shut the doomsayers up and perhaps a few of them might wonder whether the new blood in management at Fairfax were onto something when they opted for ‘generational change.’

chrisparkersmall_136When I caught up with station GM, Chris Parker (left) he was not about to get over excited, “I didn’t mind today’s result. It was a small but sustainable move in the right direction for us with all shifts going up across the prime day parts. I think for too long we’ve been reliant on the performance of brilliant weekend presenters and its right that the Monday to Friday line up is now starting to get some positive momentum.”

The biggest gain of any shift on the station (1.3) belonged to evenings hosted by the one Murray, Murray Wilton, but the second biggest, by some margin, was breakfast. Still, given it can take up to 18 months or more to change an incumbent audience, was Chris Parker surprised of the result after just 5 months?

“Not surprised. The guys are working really hard. The strategy around providing an alternative in breakfast – not necessarily to Alan Jones but a more thoughtful entertaining and engaging version of what’s out there on both FM and AM is the right strategy. And like all these things it takes time and resources to bring that to bare.

“We felt that we would take a step backwards as we alienated some listeners that were tuning into our brand of traditional breakfast talkback and we knew that we would alienate some listeners before we attracted new ones and we’ve done that so it is part of the plan. In the first 6 months of this year we would start to see some signs of reaching our new audience,” says Parker.

Interestingly, the old arch rival, Alan Jones on 2GB also went up in breakfast, giving weight to the theory that after years of beating their heads against the brick wall that is Jones, 2UE’s change of direction has them up against Jonesy and Amanda on WS-FM and Sammi and Yumi on MIX 106.5.

 “There are a lot of great FM breakfast programs out there and we don’t seek to be one of them. But we do offer ourselves up as an intelligent, entertaining and engaging alternative to any breakfast program whether they be on FM or AM. It is very much that the appeal of Dicko and Sarah has to be band agnostic. It doesn’t centre on a particular band or a particular station but we are starting, we think anecdotally, to see certainly from the type of callers we are getting, people in their mid to late 30’s – people in their early 40’s and that is very much the heartland of the Jonesy and Amanda, Sami and Yumi sort of territory,” says Parker.

duncancampbell_2_109Over are at ARN, National Content Director Duncan Campbell (left) tells me, “To be honest we don’t really focus on 2UE, but collectively it means that once upon a time you either had Alan Jones or you had the music station with Classic Hits  and now there’s more at play. There’ more choice, and that just adds to the pressure on those 40+ demos,” says Campbell. Read more here about Duncan Cambell’s take on Survey 3. 

While Parker and the Fairfax management team are cautiously optimistic at these results, it has given them enough confidence to embark on one the biggest marketing campaigns the station has done for Breakfast for a long time.

Chris Parker says, “The marketing campaign for Dicko and Sarah will be driven primarily through Fairfax press. And it was pleasing that we felt sufficiently confident in the  product to start marketing it and that was before we saw the survey results. That has us feel pretty good about the timing of all of this.”

Peter Saxon