Or was it too long?

Peter Saxon reviews the weekend on the Gold Coast.

Since she took over as Chief Executive of CRA in 2001, Joan Warner has made the annual Radio Conference and ACRAs her signature event. 

Over 14 years she’s waded through an avalanche of disparate advice provided by perhaps the toughest bunch of critics in the world.

She’s refined it and redefined it and the results were there for all to see on the weekend. For the most part (we’ll get to that later) Ms Warner has nailed it.

This year’s Conference was right on the money with every session providing real insight into radio right now and where it might be headed in the future. 

Gone are the imported celebrities with tenuous connections to radio replaced by incisive sessions that are as informative as they are entertaining with presenters that know what they are talking about.

For reasons beyond CRA’s control, the only let down was “Switch to Mitch” Fifield the new minister for communications, who apparently had something more pressing to attend than address the leaders of the Commercial Radio Industry. He chose instead to make a short video speech, devoid of passion and information we didn’t already know.

Last year’s sessions in Melbourne were arguably as good, but delegates complained that there were too many that were split into streams which meant that several interesting sessions clashed, forcing patrons to choose between them. 

This year, the organisers took a ‘less is more’ approach with streams only appearing in the last tranche of sessions. No one complained.

The ACRAs

If you wanted to nit pick you could argue that In some ways the ACRAs were better last year. Taking nothing away from Stephen Curry, but to my tastes Shane Jacobsen had more charm. 

That aside, the venue was excellent and several commented to me that Broadbeach was a really good spot because it meant that the vast majority stayed together in a compact area as opposed to the home crowd in Sydney or Melbourne drifting off home.

Particularly impressive this year was the social media output of the CRA PR team led by Melissa Fleming. It was timely and well planned.

The music acts, Justice Crew and Nathaniel were outstanding. 

There was however one complaint voiced to me by people from three different networks. It’s too long. There are too many awards rattled off in quick succession over a 4+ hour period they told me.

Hmmm. How long his too long? Clearly there are a lot of categories. Some like sales and promotions don’t appear at the Oscars or the Logies. On top of that, where there is only one level of awards at those other ceremonies, the ACRAs have three for each category, Metro, Provincial and Country.

If you want the awards to be shorter you have to accept a trade off in the level of inclusion of different disciplines and careers in different sized markets.

It’s important to realise that you don’t have to make the night any smaller, just the show shorter. Do you announce winners in a slew of categories before the awards and let the winners pick up the heavy little object on the red carpet on the way in and have it streamed out on social media?

Tell us whether you think the show is too long. And if so, how would you make it shorter?