The AdNews end of year Perspectives, looking back at 2024 and forward to next year.
Seb Rennie – SCA’s Chief Commercial Officer
2024 has been a big year for audio
Aussies now spend over a third of their time connecting with radio, podcasts and streaming, a trend that continues to grow. This shift is fuelled by the fact that audio is everywhere, the ultimate companion media, accessible in their cars, homes and via their phones (GWI, Quarterly Consumer Survey, 2024).
Radio audiences remain stable and strong with the most recent GfK Radio Survey results confirming that radio continues to reach 12.3 million Aussies each week. There is balance in that audience with roughly half of those listeners under 40.
Streaming and podcast audiences continue to command attention with 77% of the population listening via digital audio each week according (Edison Infinite Dial July 2024), with Australia now 9% ahead of the US in digital audio consumption.
The ad market remains subdued but total audio has faired better than most with radio proving resilient and digital audio continuing to be the fastest growing digital media type with growth of 24% in FY24. However, there still remains a distinct gap between the growth in audience engagement and consumption of audio, and the growth in investment.
2024 has also been a big year for SCA
We continue to dominate all people 25-54 metro radio audience, with a clear lead over our competitors. Our regional radio coverage is unrivalled and in LiSTNR we have the leading Australian digital audio ecosystem.
With increasing demand for personalisation and targeting and data led solutions, we launched the LiSTNR AdTech Hub in March with expanded Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) capabilities with age and gender, fuel prices and live context, audience targeting with LiSTNR’s proprietary conversational tool and Advertiser Data Matching with clean room solutions, which is generating outstanding results for clients.
Addressable audiences and improved insights will continue to be a focus in 2025
There are some common themes in the briefs that we are receiving for 2025. Advertisers want the audio industry to deliver addressability at scale, provide improved audience insights, and education on how best to activate a campaign that maximises audio’s ability to drive awareness, consideration and conversion.
The total audio ecosystem at SCA delivers on these needs.
LiSTNR has an addressable audience of 2.1m and is a destination for radio, music streaming and podcasts. Advertisers can unlock data and personalisation at scale and can activate via a new suite of AdTech capabilities including expanded DCO, enhanced insights driven by our unique view of our known audience, new retargeting opportunities and mood targeting.
The role of data in advertising has become central to driving more targeted, personalised and effective campaigns. The declining reliance on third-party data, desire for greater control and accuracy, and advertisers’ need to see a return on their MarTech investments means an increasing focus on effective use of first-party data will continue in 2025.
Through LiSTNR’s data matching capability and first-party insights blended with merchant data, we can provide insights into advertisers’ audiences and their spending habits, identify contextual environments audiences over index to, and assist in the acquisition or retention of customers through suppression or amplification strategies.
For regional markets we have developed the SCA Boomtown Indexer that provides buyergraphic and category specific indices to help optimise investment into the often overlooked, but hugely valuable regional markets.
At SCA we are seeing a rapidly growing customer base who want to reimagine audio campaigns and are activating multi-platform integrated campaigns that are delivering results for brands. The opportunity to reach listeners in a variety of different mindsets as they consume their audio – be it via radio, streaming or podcasting – is moving perceptions of audio from being a medium for retail-led messages to a medium that can deliver brand driven storytelling. Brands are benefiting through integration, endorsement and technology and data enabled personalisation.
2025 is gearing up to be another big year in audio.
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