Kyle & Jackie O’s big plan: Pressure now on radio bosses
The FM heavyweights are months into launching their breakfast show into Melbourne but the Bleak City is yet to embrace their bawdy sense of humour.
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As the radio industry enters its annual ‘killing season’, FM heavyweights Kyle and Jackie O are quickly learning how hard it is to service Sydney and Melbourne audiences simultaneously.
The latest radio ratings show Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson are struggling to gain mass-market traction in Victoria despite one of the industry’s biggest marketing campaigns to date.
The push to expand into Melbourne has also hurt their main Sydney audience.
So far this year, the KIIS duo have won just one of five breakfast radio ratings in Sydney, with 2GB’s Ben Fordham claiming four.
In comparison, last year when Melbourne wasn’t a factor, Kyle and Jackie O won six of the eight Sydney surveys.
Radio insiders remain doubtful the duo will be able to spread themselves across the two major metro markets, with content in both Sydney and Melbourne being sparsely different.
The show is rating seventh in the much-hyped breakfast timeslot – up 0.2 to 6.1 per cent.
In contrast, the radio team that Kyle & Jackie O replaced in Melbourne slightly increased their share to 9.9 per cent.
Management at the Australian Radio Network (ARN) removed almost $3 million worth of annual costs from their Melbourne operation to network Kyle & Jackie O on KIIS 101.1 – and, the risk they took was to move about $1 million of those costs to their North Sydney studios to create a well-resourced mega show that one day could be broadcast to every capital city nationally, and maybe some regional areas.
Sandilands has used his profile at industry events to flag his long-term goals for the radio show.
“Not even ‘perhaps’. I’m gunning for Brisbane. Make no mistake, I want the whole country,” Sandilands reportedly told media students at the University of Southern Queensland in April.
Staff at radio stations across the country are watching the duo’s Melbourne ratings, hoping that ARN doesn’t do what they did to former colleagues Jase & Lauren (Jason Hawkins and Lauren Phillips) by axing their show for a #KJShow centralised operation.
The fifth radio survey of each year delivers radio executives enough data trends for serious decisions to be made about shows and music strategy. It’s also when radio programmers begin lunching with agents, who try to pitch their talent for big-money radio positions.
Radio ‘killing season’ can be brutal, and tough decisions are made. For Kyle & Jackie O, there will be no change to their reported $200 million combined salaries over the next 10 years, but there’ll be decisions made about costs associated with marketing and stunts in the Victorian market.
Back in Sydney, Kyle and Jackie O are under enormous pressure. Last year they won six of the eight breakfast surveys, with 2GB’s Ben Fordham claiming two.
Following the expansion into Melbourne, Fordham has won four of the five rating surveys while Kyle and Jackie O have claimed just one.
Many in the radio industry are watching ARN radio bosses Ciaran Davis and Duncan Campbell to see if they’ll attempt to rein in the explicit content that is broadcast each day on the two KIIS radio stations.
While listeners reported their radio listening patterns to research company GfK – on the second last day of the recent survey period – Sandilands admitted to listeners that he had previously consumed ‘a lot of cocaine’ and it impacted his Big Brother hosting performance.
The sensor on the Kyle & Jackie O Show was working overtime today.
— Brenden Wood (@BrendenWood) August 7, 2024
This is audio broadcast on KIIS in Sydney & Melbourne. Almost a minute’s worth of tone was heard by listeners.
A horrible listening experience.
The show could have jumped out of delay instead of airing tone. pic.twitter.com/hSiRBTVOwP
On the same day as the Big Brother admission, the KIIS censors replaced almost a minute of content on the Kyle & Jackie O Show with tone. One second is a long time in radio – one minute is like a lifetime in broadcast media.
The, sensor monitors the radio show live listening to a pre-delay audio feed of the show, made a decision that a lengthy chunk of an early morning discussion with a listener wasn’t to a broadcast standard that would impress lawyers or the federal government’s watchdog, ACMA.
Executives would agree that one minute of tone is enough to force people to turn off their radios – in fact, a content director would prefer two-30 second commercials to be broadcast, rather than tone.
Despite the content standards slipping, the final three weeks of the five week survey period that was released on Tuesday was a struggle for the KIIS content team who were forced to work around several Kyle & Jackie O staff who didn’t appear on air due to illness and other issues.
Sandilands was away for six days of the survey, and listeners heard several days of prerecorded shows – on some occasions rising media star Cooper Johns co-hosted the show into Sydney and Melbourne.
Kyle & Jackie O are regarded among the best broadcasters of all time in the world – this list includes stars like Howard Stern, Ray Hadley, John Laws, Rush Limbaugh and Alan Jones – and Tuesday’s survey result in Sydney was very strong. But is it their edgy content that isn’t resonating with the Melbourne audience or are they simply ‘too Sydney’ for that market?
If you think you can help the show with their bi-city operations, they’re currently looking for a new executive producer.
* News Corp’s Brenden Wood has previously been the executive producer for radio shows in Sydney and Brisbane, including ARN, where Kyle & Jackie O are employed.
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