By Steve Faguy
FOR A MEDIA SECTOR whose consumption comes predominantly from commuters in their cars, what happens when everyone works from home and there is no more commuting?
The radio business found out in the past year. The covid-19 pandemic, as we outlined last week, was very bad for radio advertising as local economies shut down for months and people simply stayed home, rarely turning on that reliable car radio in the morning. “When Covid first hit, radio tuning dropped by 30% in Canada,” said Troy Reeb, executive vice president broadcast networks at Corus Entertainment.
But rather than lose audience entirely, it seems they just shifted, listening later in the day and more at home, executives tell Cartt.ca.
“Certainly early on in Covid there was a massive flip to out-of-work and into at-home listening,” says Rod Schween, president of the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group. “We’ve seen a huge increase in streaming because they’re now not maybe having to be stuck to an office radio that got selected and played in the office. Now they can stream whatever they want to their home system.”
Reeb says Corus has also seen a major increase in streaming their stations.
“The most significant audience change that I cross my fingers holds positive opportunities for radio in the future, is that the proportion of people listening to radio through smart speakers is at its highest level ever,” he says.
As listeners started working from home and looked for some familiar background noise, “people found they didn’t have radio tuners. Where do you buy a clock radio anymore?”
Enter smart speakers like Google Home and Amazon Echo, where people can ask Google or Alexa to stream their local radio station for them.
“I think it was a huge worry for myself and for many radio executives for many years that they would come and we would disappear from the home environment, and the one thing Covid has shown us positively is that hasn’t happened. People have found radio on their smart speakers. They’re listening to radio through the day and streaming levels for radio during daytime hours… have more than tripled since the beginning of the pandemic. We’re now into double digits the percentage of tuning that’s coming from streaming during the day.”
The big question is whether that holds after the pandemic.
“People were maybe not listening as early to our morning shows as they were in the past because now they didn’t have to be to the office by 7:30.” – Rod Schween, Jim Pattison Broadcast Group
Meanwhile, since many people don’t have to commute anymore, morning listening has dropped and peak hours are now later in the day.
“People were maybe not listening as early to our morning shows as they were in the past because now they didn’t have to be to the office by 7:30,” Schween says. “So maybe they got to sleep an extra half-hour or hour long because they didn’t have the commute anymore.”
Reeb says daytime listening is as high as mornings now, and programming teams have been discussing how to adapt to that.
“The morning primetime used to start at 5:30 a.m. and kind of go to 9, and now we have very much shifted in many locations to it sort of being a 7-10 block instead. Not that we’ve made major talent changes or anything like that, but we’re recognizing that the number of people tuning in a little bit later and staying a little bit later or through the day has changed and whether that’s a permanent change or not, I don’t know.”
It used to be that the peak listener time was in the 7 a.m. hour, and that’s when morning shows would make big announcements or hold contests.
“Your peak hours now have moved at least an hour later, I would say it’s in the 8 o’clock hour as opposed to the 7 o’clock hour like it used to be,” Reeb continued. “And it’s holding up. You used to have this fairly large drop-off after 9 a.m. as people went to work and settled in, and it’s not the case anymore. It’s not as big in the morning… and it’s holding steady with very little degradation until about the end of the workday.”
For Schween, the change means looking at new opportunities, but, to use an analogy from Wayne Gretzky that he likes, “nobody totally knows where the puck is going to be” after this is all over.
“We’re looking at things like digital ad insertion and we’re going to get better rates out of daytime listening on that than we will out of mornings or evenings,” he explained. “That doesn’t mean that we totally change our strategy around mornings because that’s still our core business, and it’s going to continue to be our core business for quite a period of time.”
He says he’s already seeing some rebound in morning audiences as the world starts slowly returning to normal, “or closer to what normal was before.”
This is part four of our continuing series on the Canadian radio business. Please click here for part one, here for part two and here for part three.
