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Five new features for AudioNET® clients - Find out more in the AudioNET® Bits below... Nova Continues Melbourne Fall Nova 100 fell 1.7% overall in Melbourne, with afternoons and mornings shedding 2.9% and 2.3% of their audiences, and smaller drops in breakfast and drive. 3AW gained an extra 1.2% of the available audience to maintain its number one spot. FOX and ABC 774 held their number two and three positions with audience gains of 1.1% and 0.7% respectively and GOLD moved into the number four spot with a 0.3% gain. In Sydney 2DAY dropped 1.1% on its survey #4 results, but still maintained its number one slot. Breakfast leader, Alan Jones suffered the biggest audience drop in breakfast - down 1.6% to 14.5. However, 2DAY's breakfast team also shed 1.1% of their audience, leaving Jones with a 3.4% lead. Relative newcomer Steve Price appeared to take audience from Jones, going up 1.7% at 2UE to remain third in breakfast on 10.2%.
......Ugly
Phil departs on a high.... Nova 96.9 made its biggest gains in evenings and Drive with Ugly Phil increasing his audience by 1.5%. Ironically, Phil O'Neill has just resigned from Nova, to pursue a long-held desire to host a youth talk format. B105 went up 2.4% in Brisbane to hold number one with a 20.3% audience share. FM104's 0.6% increase moved it up one spot into equal second with NEW 97.3, which dropped by the same amount. In Adelaide, the number one station SAFM went up 1.1% and 5AA, 5MMM and MIX 102.3 maintained their 2nd, 3rd and 4th positions with minimal audience changes. Similarly in Perth, top rating MIX 94.5 grew its audience by 2%, with 2nd, 3rd and 4th spots still held by 92.9, 96FM and 6PR respectively..despite a 1.7% drop at 96FM. Full details on the ACNielsen website.
Living Legends to Speak at Radio Conference Live Aid convenor Sir Bob Geldof and convicted Watergate
conspirator G. Gordon Liddy will both appear at this year's Commercial
Radio Conference in Melbourne in October to discuss the power and
significance of commercial radio as an instrument of social change. Liddy was General Counsel and political intelligence director for the 1972 Republican presidential campaign. He served five years of a 20 year prison sentence for planning the break-in of the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Hotel. He was released from jail by President Jimmy Carter and now hosts his own radio talkback show which is broadcast in more than 160 markets across the US. Other speakers at the conference include Walter Sabo, CEO of New York brand management consultancy, Sabo Media and Denis Handlin, CEO of Sony Records in Australia. The seminar will conclude with a charity lunch where Sir Bob Geldof and Gordon Liddy will speak about their broader life experiences. The Commercial Radio Seminar 2002 : Myths, Legends and Trends, will be held on October 18 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Ticket details will be posted on theCommercial Radio website in the near future: Webster
to Judge Radio AWARDs Joining Flint Websters' Philip Webster as judges in the radio category at the AWARDs are: Tim Brown from Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney; Ric Cairns from Marketforce WA; Paul Hankinson from M&C Saatchi; Simon Lister from Human; Greg Logan from Leo Burnett; and Sandy Peacock from Clemenger BBDO Qld. The other judging panels are for: Craft in Television & Cinema; Direct Marketing; Graphic Design & Packaging, Editorial Design; Interactive Media; Print & Print Crafts; Television & Cinema. The various award juries will decide on the finalists - whose work will appear in the AWARD Annual 2002 - following which AWARD Members will be given the opportunity to vote for Gold, Silver and Bronze.
Carlie Gosson opened her Airwaves commercial production studio in Sydney eight years ago when full-time jingle production started to dwindle and she needed to decide on a future business direction. Since then, the changes have just kept coming .and coming faster. "There's been more change since 2000 than in the previous six or eight years," Carlie says. The reasons are many and varied, but the two key things in her mind are cheaper cost of entry into the business and general familiarity with technology that now drives most of the recording and editing. "So a lot of people can set up a recording environment without having to go through expensive audio schools and having to work your way up. Everyone uses a PC these days and anyone can pretty much work out a simple audio editing program so in this way I think the business has definitely changed. ...Soaking up the vibe to be faster off the mark ... "Obviously September 11 has made a huge dent. It's very quiet in Sydney, especially at the moment. I think that also a lot of the video guys are now getting audio suites and are setting up in-house..a lot of agencies are setting up in-house ..plus there's not the same amount of labour intensive work that's required any more." While some companies spend money on advisers and marketing consultants and spend time drawing up business plans and marketing plans, Carlie says she prefers to use information that's freely available and test it with her gut instinct. "You have to talk to everyone. Taxi drivers, dispatch guys, managing directors of companies and clients. You've just got to soak up the vibe of what's happening and make decisions based on that plus rely on your experience. I suppose a lot of people would say you have to have a marketing plan and you should be more structured, but I like to be faster off of the mark than that so talking to people is one of my approaches and works for me. "After eight years in the business you hope you've got a fairly good idea of how you're going and what's going to happen and you know enough people to give you a pretty good idea of what's going happen." ".if you cruise.you can get caught..." "So if you think it's going to be a great year and you're doing a million jobs and the work keeps coming you can feel it in the air..but all of a sudden if that changes, you feel it too. You can sit there and cry about it or you ask what can I do to change with it - because if you don't change you die." Carlie's changes have included incorporating more direct client work such as Integrated Voice Recognition (IVR), Speech Recognition, customised CDs for corporates, music, messages on hold and foreign language record. "IVR is a pretty good example. I've just done a job for Reuters in Asia, recording in Mandarin, Taiwanese, Indonesian and Malay. We also did a job for the Sydney Taxi Company. We recorded 40,000 wav files. It took three months, but we did it all on a laptop and sent it through on CD. "If you rest on your laurels and cruise you can get
caught. That's what I've learnt - you've just gotta keep
dancing." Song Zu Makes a Meal of ATV Awards Saatchi & Saatchi won the Advertising Agency of the Year award at the ATV Awards, picking up three trophies and seven highly commended mentions. Bruce Hunt from @Radical Media was named Director of the Year. Song Zu's music and sound production efforts for 'Dining Out' and 'Prison' contributed towards six of the studio's 10 trophy mentions including Best of Show, Commercial of the Year, Music and Sound Design - the latter two categories sponsored by..Song Zu! Paul Le Couteur's trilogy of ads for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival "Full Moon," "Surgeon," and "Ice Cream" scooped the Trophy and both the Highly Commended mentions in the Leisure and Entertainment Category as well as the trophies for Series, Use of Humour and Cinema. Other studios with trophy winning production included Digital Post, John Marsh, Supersonic, Sound Reservoir, Sound Lounge, Duffield Kenihan, Take 2 and Audiobrien. Full list of winners available at the Australasian TV Awards site:AAV Chief Executive Ted Gregory says the acquisition of GMD is the first step in a major expansion phase for the AAV Australia Group. "GMD is recognised as a local and international design force and the company has a number of exciting projects to its credit," he said. One of GMD's major television projects was the design and production of 3D animation and VFX for the first series of Farscape, a 22 episode science fiction series for the Jim Henson Company and Hallmark Entertainment The company has also worked on a range of A-grade feature films that include Phillip Noyce's 'Rabbit Proof Fence' and 'The Quiet American' and 'Lord of the Rings - Fellowship of the Rings'. Other companies currently within the AAV stable include Digital Pictures Sydney and Melbourne, Flagstaff Studios Melbourne and boutique design house, Iloura Melbourne.
In its final report on 'Loudness of Advertisements on Commercial Television' the ABA recommends that FACTS develop a new code for the Commercial Television Industry Codes of Practice that relates to loudness of advertisements relative to adjacent programming. The ABA notes that there were no community concerns about the loudness of commercials on radio. The Audio and Video Post Production Industry produced a 32 page submission to the ABA inquiry, pointing out among other things, that production houses have no control over the loudness of television commercials relative to adjacent programming. The AVPPI submission noted that most audio and video post-production industry adhere to the current broadcast technical recommendations and requirements. However, the submission indicated that current audio production practices could be modified for example, by maintaining dialogue levels between -6dB and 0VU, if adequate technical recommendations were available. AVPPI noted that it is very hard to enforce loudness control if no guidelines are published or quantitative monitoring means available. Contributors to the submission (the largest presented on the issue) included Digital Pictures, Flint Webster, Flagstaff, David + John, GAS, Rowlands. .ABA acknowledges no pure technical solution. In its final report, the ABA notes that 'limiting', 'equalisation' and 'compression' are techniques that can be used to make advertisements sound louder. It also acknowledges that there is presently no pure technical solution to address the matter but it mentions the impending release this year of a Dolby Broadcast Loudness Meter (LM100) that would provide a broadcast friendly solution for measuring the loudness of content, enabling broadcasters to adjust channels and programmes towards the same loudness level. Although FACTS' submission contended that it was not possible for broadcasters to control the factors that lead to loudness, the ABA's directives that FACTS develop a code of practice and amend its guidelines indicate that the industry body will be expected to take a lead on the issue. If not, the ABA states that "If the commercial television broadcasting licensees are unable to develop a suitable code, the ABA will consider whether to exercise its standard-making power to determine a standard to address this issue."
ATR Australia has won the regional TV ratings on top of its current contract to supply metro TV ratings for OzTAM. ATR's new contract allows it to market ratings data for Win, Prime, Southern Cross, NBN and Seven Qld for the next 12 months. In January it won a seven year contract to conduct the television audience measurement in regional Australia. Chris O'Connell from the Regional Survey
Tender Committee said the sales and marketing contract was new territory for
regional broadcasters, so they decided that a shorter term contract initially
would allow more time to better assess their
options. AudioNET Bits ... From Vaughan Roberts - Chief AudioNET® Programmer / Web Designer A lot has happened in the last month...I've been busy putting the finishing touches on some AudioNET® improvements, (which I'll get to in a moment), and Verity and Dave celebrated the birth of their first baby.
As for the aforementioned AudioNET® improvements...we have responded to some of your feedback and have added a snazzy new progress bar to monitor uploading; an option for senders to receive a Delivery Confirmation e-mail; choice of HTML or plain text e-mails; option to notify radio stations of the On-Air date of tracks, plus a handy little button that copies the file name into the key number field when sending. The AudioNET® Progress Bar confirms how many tracks and to how many receivers you are sending and tells you how long to go. The Delivery Confirmation e-mail option can be turned on or off from User Preferences on the House Keeping page or "on the fly" by ticking or un-ticking the box on the Upload Success page. The e-mail can be plain text or HTML (Your logo included), and is perfect for forwarding on to clients. E-mail options...now we support both kinds (Country and Western) HTML with easier to use more intuitive links as well as the original plain text e-mails. Both options are selectable from your User Preferences on the House Keeping page. The On-Air Date option is a new feature suggested by Rod Lowe at GAS in Melbourne. This optional bit of information will be included on the Delivery e-mail alert to the radio station as well as on screen for both the receiving radio station(s) and the sending production studio. Down the track we hope to implement automatic e-mail notification for stations that have not downloaded a track that is "On-Air" the next day. Finally thanks to a suggestion from Greg Clark in Adelaide, we now have a handy little button on the Send Track page that looks like a little downwards arrow, that copies the file name to the Key Number. Very handy if the name of the file saved on your hard drive is the same as the key number of the track. More Radio Stations...Ben at GAS and Caillin at Flint's asked about using AudioNET® to send to a couple of non commercial radio stations recently, namely 3ZZZ in Melbourne and SBS Radio. A couple of phone calls and 5 minutes later 3ZZZ and SBS Radio are now on the AudioNET® list of registered stations. If you have radio stations that you regularly send to that don't appear on the AudioNET® list of stations, simply call or e-mail us with the details and we'll get in contact and sign them up straight away. Don't forget you can add your own AudioNET® receivers at anytime, like Chris from Rowlands' did last week...in fact he added an entire NZ network. Simply click on Add New Receivers and fill in the details of Who, Where and E-mail details, click the button and they receive a welcome e-mail from you with instructions and are added instantly to your receiver list. Personal receivers added by you, do not appear on the receiver lists of any other AudioNET® senders.
If you have any suggestions about improvements to AudioNET, we would like to hear from you at feedback@dbmsystems.com.au or call Dave or Verity on 03 9687 9055.
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Killer Bits: August 2002
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