Smoothfm has expanded from the two major metros of Sydney and Melbourne into Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, creating a national platform for advertisers.
The NOVA Entertainment-owned network is curated to make listeners "feel good" with announcers picked to complement the music format, with smoothfm being the first Australian radio station to be programmed based on a mood rather than an era or genre.
AdNews spoke to Adam Johnson, NOVA Entertainment’s chief growth officer, about Smooth’s partnership with Amazon, the importance of localisation when expanding and how advertisers can take advantage.
Johnson said while the expansion was something that had been talked about as a business for a while, it was at the start of the year - when they assessed growth plans, acknowledged the ongoing trend of DAB+ taking a bigger share of broadcast listening and saw the ongoing rise of digital audio - that the expansion really came to life.
“The kind of ‘penny drop’ moment was in a planning session where we thought ‘you don't need a radio station to have a radio station’. This notion of tying a radio station to an FM or an AM broadcast signal is pretty antiquated.
“As long as the brand is good, and most importantly the product is good, then it should be able to live anywhere.
“NOVA already has ubiquitous reach across the five capital cities and smoothfm has always felt bigger than just a two-city station. It was like ‘we've got spectrum, we've got IP, we've got an app - let's go’. It was really about seizing on the opportunity.
“From a listener point of view, we think that the world could do with more feel-good right now. It just felt like the time was right to bring that brand further across the Australian mainstream.”
The brand has attracted a highly engaged audience across broadcast, with the latest figures showing 2.4 million listeners in Sydney and Melbourne, a 291% increase in cumulative broadcast listeners since launching in May 2012.
Johnson said that while it's taken 10 years to grow to those numbers, they recognised early on the opportunity of a radio station that was programmed around a feeling rather than a genre or a time period.
“I think the growth to date has been around the product and then some really great marketing campaigns with the likes of Michael Buble and Robbie Williams, these kind of artist endorsements of people with real broad appeal that bring the brand and the music playlist to life.”
With a 76% increase in audiences accessing the station via streaming from March 2020 to July 2022, Johnson said that although it’s off of a much smaller base, the growth in digital is faster than traditional formats and it's the ‘rocket ship’ in terms of listening.
“Within our portfolio, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Smooth listener might be more of a tech laggard than a NOVA listener, but actually the uptake of downloads and registrations for the Smooth Player are up there with the NOVA Player and time spent listening is greater on these devices.
“While Smooth has as a slightly older demographic than NOVA, the audience really lean into connected listening.
“We see a huge opportunity around smart speakers - that demographic have a high disposable income and they don't mind spending a few hundred dollars on an Amazon Alexa.
“The use case for that is listening to the radio – the first thing they do is ask it to play their favourite radio station. That’s given us the confidence to know that if we tell people where they can find the station and they have the means to listen to it, they will listen, wherever and however it suits them.”
That vision of utilising smart speakers to expand their reach isn’t just a hypothetical – it’s the start of a longer-term partnership that NOVA is looking to build with Amazon that includes smoothfm as well as other brands.
“We see what Amazon does as an accelerant to digital transformation and helping to speed up digital audio consumption, because they’ve got great devices and a great platform.
“We have first party integration on the Alexa platform, so the streams come from us, rather than a radio app. From a data capability point of view, it gives us much more tools to play with; we see them as a valued and valuable partner for us.
“This is why it is genuinely one of those mutually beneficial partnerships - we can educate listeners that ‘if you've got one of these devices, here's some cool stuff that you can do with it. Similarly, if you haven't got one of these devices, maybe you should, because now you can listen to Smooth in your kitchen, in your workshop, in your bedroom, etc’."
The partnership will be executed across all of the smoothfm stations; listeners have a chance to win Amazon Alexa devices thanks to smoothfm’s promotional platform Smooth Stars, with this being the first time a Smooth Stars promotion has been run across the whole country.
The new markets will have live breakfast shows hosted by respected broadcasters - Kate Mac in Perth (pictured below), Nick Michaels in Brisbane (pictured further below) and Kelly Golding in Adelaide, providing a local connection and content for listeners in these states.
Johnson said that they carried out a large amount of research in the new cities, both from a quantitative point of view and a number of focus groups, asking people both aware and unaware of Smooth what they expect from a radio station in terms of localism.
“What that informed was across the day, that utility side of things and ‘public service’ broadcasts around your news, traffic and weather needs to be localised, and we're very used to doing that across the NOVA network.
“We have the partnerships, we have the journalists and we have the technology to be able to localise those kinds of things and particularly at breakfast, people want to feel like they're listening to somebody from where they live. While it takes three times the investment from our side of things to have individual presenters, it's the right thing to do, because you can't fake that stuff.”
Johnson said that the ability for a presenter to be completely reactive to a traffic or weather event, or a feel-good story that's happened in a city, provides an authenticity to that local market.
“What our listeners, both current and prospective, told us is to make it local and useful to them. One of the examples that they said was ‘don't just say have fun at the grand final tonight; tell me the best way to get there’.
“We went out and found some really great people, some of whom have been friends of NOVA Entertainment for a while and some of whom are new to us. For Kate in Perth, that's kind of a homecoming for her, so we're delighted to have her back. Kelly in Adelaide is a TV star there and she's got a really good profile in that city. Nick has been a great poach for us; he was at 4KQ for around 15 years and built a really good listener base there that we hope will join him over on More Music Breakfast on Smooth Brisbane.
“If you look at some of the 4BH numbers that they've got on the most recent survey where the 4KQ breakfast has moved over, you can tell that by that station ‘coming off the dial’ and becoming a sports station, there's definitely listeners that are looking for their feel-good music fix, and therefore, I think the Smooth opportunity has grown.
“Having Nick there to spearhead that will really help us bring listeners over. It's not just shoving somebody in there who happens to live in Brisbane, it's about finding the right people as well.”
A multi-million-dollar marketing effort for the rollout into Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth is already underway, with TV spots beginning on Sunday night and an out of home campaign starting yesterday.
“It's a heavyweight, multi-channel campaign across TV - broadcaster and VOD – with a big outdoor push, because we know that landing a brand in market is about feeling like a brand is in the fabric of your city and outdoor does a really nice job of that.
“Further down the funnel, we’ll be utilising a lot of digital from an educational point of view. We genuinely believe that the campaign will grab people's attention in terms of building brand awareness and salience, but when it hasn't got an FM frequency tied to it, there is some heavy lifting to say that ‘you can listen to this great station here, here and here’.
“We've evolved the Robbie Williams spot that has run in Sydney and Melbourne for these [new] markets. We're going to use the same kind of ad, but we've tailored it to be a bit more educational, so more focus on the Alexa devices, the mobile app, the car listening by DAB and Robbie kind of showing more illustratively how you can do that.”
Johnson said that the expansion of Smooth gives local advertisers another radio station where they can tell local audiences about their products and services.
“We’re having lots of really positive, more localised conversations about a NOVA and a Smooth buy across those two different demos, so that's one area of it, and then the other is genuine national coverage now.
“A single buy will get you access to Smooth and our position is that the 2.4 million on FM in Sydney and Melbourne will just grow. When you add that to the 4.3 million on NOVA, we can offer a 10-station buy now, which is really exciting because we've always been a five-plus-two business.
“To offer a 10-station buy for national advertisers, particularly those big categories where you want to reach everyone from a 27-year-old NOVA listener to a 49-year-old Smooth listener and everyone in between, is just providing another platform where they can bring their brand to life.
“With, radio, audio, and particularly on NOVA Entertainment brands, it's brand-safe and it's a trusted environment. We know that radio presenters engender huge trust with audiences when it comes to delivering commercial messages.
“There’s three big things there - a new local commercial platform, a new kind of national five station media buy and then lots of opportunities for message integration in a trusted environment with familiar voices.”
Looking more broadly at NOVA, Johnson said the expansion will bring more people into their ecosystem, particularly when FM isn't one of the channels.
“Proportionally, we will have a greater number of IP-connected addressable audiences that are coming in for Smooth in those three big cities, which means that from a NOVA Entertainment point of view, more understanding of what they're doing.
“Ultimately, the Smooth Player is the same as the NOVA Player - it’s the same back end but different front ends - so when you create your Smooth account, you effectively create a NOVA Entertainment account, and that allows us to understand those audiences a bit better and create a bigger addressable inventory pool for advertisers on digital.
“It's a great way to build our connected audience, because it's a product that we know people are already leaning into in terms of listening over a connected device. More customers coming in that route is a great thing for us.”
Johnson said that building that national audience base across the five capital cities will occupy NOVA’s focus for the rest of 2022 and all of 2023, but a further expansion in the future isn’t off the cards.
“What I will say is that we are hoping to prove the model here of ‘you don't need a radio to have a radio station’. Therefore, there is an argument that even if you don't have a DAB spectrum in Canberra, Newcastle, Hobart, Geelong, wherever that may be - if the brand is right and the product is right, people will find it.
“If we can prove that model here - that even without an FM signal we can find an audience - then at that point, the sky's the limit.”
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