What you need to know:

• Commercial Radio and Audio (CRA) held its annual Heard conference on Wednesday afternoon.
• The event was headlined by the launch of the commercial radio body's very own cross-network digital trading currency, CRA Audio ID.
• Developed in partnership with Radio 360 provider GfK, the new solution will bring together digital audio inventory from local broadcasters ARN, Nine, Nova and Southern Cross Austereo.
• It will launch in June with metro and regional streaming audio, with podcast to follow later in the year, and data matching capabilities also in the pipe. 
• Total audio is in CRA's sights just six months into the tenure of CEO Lizzie Young. She says cross-network digital trading is just the "first milestone" on that journey, with "lots of work" still to go.
• Alongside the planning and measurement, creative improvement was showcased as the great unlock for further effectiveness of radio in isolation, but also within a media mix, with brand building campaign examples from VB, Nespresso, Dan Murphy's and McDonald's highlighted as examples of this in action.
• According to System1 SVP global partners Andrew Tindall, brands can 'double the doubling' of effectiveness of spending 11 per cent on radio advertising touted last year by Mark Ritson by bringing radio up the funnel, recognising its brand building strengths an employing right-brain assets, notably sonic branding.
• Analytic Partners MD Paul Sinkinson, agreed, pointing out such creative beats performance marketing 80 per cent of the time. Yet too many brands are still writing the same ad scripts they penned 100 years ago for radio and missing a trick by crafting creative suited to the medium, he said.

Commercial Radio and Audio (CRA) has gone the way of Australia’s broadcast TV networks, with plans to land a unified digital audio trading currency in market this year.

Announced at the commercial radio body's annual Heard conference on Tuesday, the CRA Audio ID answers growing calls from agencies and clients to simplify media planning and reporting across the piste. It'll bring together digital audio inventory from local broadcasters ARN, Nine, Nova and Southern Cross Austereo to deliver cross-network campaign optimisation with de-duped reach and frequency, and enhanced targeting capabilities.

It’s the first major initiative under the belt of new CRA chief Lizzie Young, who has been driving the project since she joined the Australian commercial radio body six months ago off the back of a two-year stint at would-be social media disruptor WeAre8.  

She says the new systems reflects CRA’s strategic imperative to make radio “easier to buy”, in the hopes of matching the channel’s revenues to its audience, which continues to climb thanks largely to gains in digital radio and podcasting.

Per CRA, that audience growth looks like a record 12.3 million metro listeners and 4.6 million regional listeners tuning into commercial radio across linear and streaming in the final survey of 2024. Meanwhile podcast audiences have lifted 37 per cent in the last two years per the latest annual report published with Triton Digital, and are now reaching 11 million Australians each month.

Those audience figures sits against a comparatively marginal uplift of 1.7 per cent lift across the total audio market in 2024, according to the latest SMI figures, with a 3.4 decline in linear radio spend offset by a 15.1 per cent lift across digital audio (streaming and podcasting). Though, CRA’s own figures are slightly more generous, putting total audio revenue at a 1 per cent uplift for 2024, encompassing a ‘flat’ result in linear flat and 30 per cent growth in digital.

It's a major opportunity for growth in CRA's eyes, and its coming at competitors directly to prove the point.

"Five times more Australians are listening to radio than ad-supported Spotify yet we know we underperform in the total addressable digital audio ad market," says Young, citing last year's Infinite Dial report.

Total audio in sight

Behind this week’s announcement is months of consultation with the market that has seen CRA and its members doing the rounds with the consortiums, indie agencies and with clients directly. And Young says it’s so far been an overwhelmingly positive response.

Currently in development for a June launch, the CRA Audio ID will be launched within GfK – the same measurement partner that launched CRA’s Radio 360 measurement service in 2023, after six years in the making. It will be made available via partnerships with demand-side platforms (DSPs), for which a number of conversations are currently ongoing.

The new solution will land with metro and regional streaming audio inventory onboard, with podcast audiences to be rolled in later in the year, and data matching capabilities also in the pipe.

The longer view, as it’s understood, will be to deliver a total audio product that brings linear inventory together with digital streaming and podcasting.

“We seen an enormous opportunity in that,” says Young. “This is the first milestone that we've hit that sees us on that journey, really. But [there’s] still lots of work to go from here.”

Whether that could one day reach beyond the scope of the broadcaster’s networks – the answer’s “never say never”.

“We absolutely accept that trading total audio would be incredible for marketers and agencies,” per Young. “I think there's definitely potential for us to consider who else in the local industry might have audio inventory that they would want to trade it this way.”

It’s not a far-fetched concept. From its early iterations the platform will already enable broadcasters to sling podcast content outside of their owned assets, via the numerous sales representations deals they have in place.

Not like VOZ

It’s easy to liken CRA’s latest work to TV’s VOZ Streaming. But CRA seems keen to keep some distance from then new OzTam tech – perhaps due in part to the mixed feedback the latter has to date.

Young does acknowledge there’s some parallels, but she’s optimistic they’ll be well-placed to keep things moving at the right pace.

“I think we've managed to develop the right product at the right time and be in a place where the launch makes sense.”

From Ritson’s Batman and Robin to Chrissy Swan’s lazy bunnies: Nespresso, VB prove radio’s hard-working impact with more effective creative and brand building focus

Outside of making it less onerous to plan and execute advertising across the audio ecosystem, a plea for brands to invest in better creative and push radio further up the marketing funnel were highlighted as ways to unlock more impact and effectiveness – both in channel and across your mix – during the Heard event.

Last year, Mark Ritson’s analogy for radio advertising was as Batman’s Robin or Han Solo’s Chewbacca – the ultimate, hard-working sidekick to a marketer’s other channels, and one that delivers double the effectiveness for those who invest 11 per cent of their ad spend into it. That study, which analysed 460 Effie Award entries from the Advertising Council of Australia's Effectiveness Database, also found adding radio to a campaign to exceed share of voice [eSOV] results leads to a 32-point improvement in business results. Ritson further noted radio has a 3.5x impact on retention, can bring double-digit improvements to brand association, mental availability, acquisition and brand awareness.

A year on, and it was Nova radio presenter, Chrissy Swan, anecdotally using analogies to highlight radio’s hard-working effect for advertisers against other channels. In this case, it was her two bunnies – Chicago and Ginger – that came into the frame.

“I feel like television is like Chicago: Very pretty right? But Ginger is like radio – doing all the hard work, cleaning, delivering day in, day out, but everyone wants to look at Chicago,” Swan commented.  

Backing up the anecdotal banter with numbers was System1 SVP of global partnerships, Andrew Tindall, who shared new research showing brands can make radio work even harder if they put more brand building skew into their creative efforts. System 1’s latest research of UK radio impact, beefed up with a supplementary analysis of 56 Australian audio campaigns with 8000+ local listeners, showed brands that firstly spend the 11 per cent, but then support it with more brand-oriented, emotionally fuelled and memorable creative, can double their effectiveness yet again.

The problem is most brands are not doing this, said Tindall. Not one Australian brand tested by System1 achieved strong or exceptional creative fluency, the measure the firm uses to indicate the percentage of listeners correctly recalling the brand, with the average sitting at 68 per cent. In addition, half scored 1 out of 5 on System1’s Star rating for creative strength.  

The power of sticking with your creative knitting through sonic branding and distinctive assets was highlighted as a counteracting step. As previously covered by Mi3, System1’s recent research to prove out the compound effect consistency of brand idea and campaign messaging showed +10 per cent sales value gain, +18 per cent profit gain and +19 per cent market share gain.

Backing up the consistency argument in System1’s new radio advertising study was the strongest local ad performer, Victoria Bitter, with its classic ‘Theme Song’ from 2005, which scored a Star Rating of 4.1.

To double radio’s effect, Tindall argued for a more right-brain approach to radio advertising – in other words, more brand-building oriented creative that takes advantage of the latent consumer trust existing in radio as a medium. Improving memorability often means leaving listeners feeling positive, while employing characters with vitality, a stronger story narrative, playing with words, deliberate pauses and sonic assets are all critical tools here, he said.

Other brands to perform well in System1 testing illustrating this kind of right-brain creative in action include Aldi’s ‘Panettone Christmas’ campaign, Bupa’s ‘Contagious Smile’ campaign, and Bing Lee’s ‘Birthday Sale’.

By contrast, narrower, left-brain approaches to be avoided include unilateral communications, audio repetition, overt calls to action, flatness or lack of audio depth, data and figures and a strong product focus. Dull campaigns can in fact cost £10 million more in media spend to get the same effect as “interesting” campaigns, according to Tindall.

“We saw this in radio… one campaign was so boring and so poorly branded, it shifted ad awareness backwards. That points to how advertising works – advertising’s main job is to keep sales going, to maintain sales and stop memories eroding,” he said.

“You could call is salesmanship over showmanship. These [left-brain] features assume the listener just sat there, ready to be sold at. They’re just more useful at delivering messages and rational persuasion. The key is to load radio ads with brand oriented, right-brain features so we can lean into more business and brand effects.”

Nespresso’s 37% uplift from using radio for brand building

Later in the session, Analytic Partners MD, Paul Sinkinson, heaped further criticism on the lack of focus Aussie brands exhibit when it comes to creating distinctive advertising for radio, claiming nothing much has changed since people used scripts to read radio advertising in the 1920s.

Analytic Partners showcased new research at Heard 2025 of how a recent Nespresso’s brand-oriented campaign, alongside previous radio trials, showed radio’s strength in delivering cross-channel amplification. By prioritising creative consistency and sustained media support, Nespresso achieved a 37 per cent improvement in their radio ROI year-on-year. This approach also elevated the brand's digital video by 13 per cent, socials by 11 per cent, and search by 4 per cent.

“It shows the lift sitting there by just having people think about the radio ad, rather than as a byproduct or just as something with a script,” Sinkinson said.

Sinkinson noted brand-focused advertising outperforms performance-driven campaigns 80 per cent of the time, and called on brands to see radio as a medium that can deliver this. Yet right now, you’re lucky to see a radio campaign running more than four weeks, he said.

As per older Analytic Partners research, increasing the weight of brand advertising versus the amount placed on price messaging – and using its 20-year-old iconic sonic asset – also gave McDonald’s Australia a 13 per cent increase in radio ROI, along with a 14 per cent lift in TV, 12 per cent in social media, and 3 per cent in online video.

Additionally referenced by Sinkinson and Dan Murphy’s media partner, Carat, was the retailer’s recent brand-oriented radio campaign, which led to a 19 per cent uplift in out-of-home results, plus 18 per cent boost in TV impact, and 14 per cent enhancement in online video effectiveness.

“Think about the yield curve: You are over that point of diminishing returns in so many channels; we can see it. Costs are going up, you’re paying more to get the same amount of volume and there are channels sitting there screaming out for a bit of investment sitting at that steep part of the curve,” said Sinkinson. “This is the poster child of where it shouldn’t have worked – it’s not performance, it’s literally doing the hardest of the heavy lifting at the start of the campaign launch and it’s helping moving pictures work.”