Unmade: media and marketing analysis podcast

August 05, 2025 Christian O'Connell is going national. Or is he?

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade. Today we talk to Christian O’Connell about his plans to (sort of) take his radio show national. Plus a big fall for Seven West Media on the Unmade index.

We’ve announced the schedule for this year’s Compass series. Our panel-in-the-pub, end-of-year tour kicks off in Sydney on November 3 and concludes in Hobart a fortnight later. Reflecting on 2025 and projecting into 2026, please hold the date for your city:

* November 3 – Compass Sydney

* November 5 – Compass Brisbane

* November 10 – Compass Adelaide

* November 11 – Compass Perth

* November 17 – Compass Melbourne

* November 18 – Compass Hobart

Unmade’s paying members get a free ticket to Compass. Your annual membership also gets you tickets to September’s REmade conference on retail media; and to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy.

And you also get access to our paywalled archive.

Upgrade today.

When is a radio show not really national? When it’s on DAB

I have something of a confession.

When I recorded this week’s podcast with Christian O’Connell on Monday morning, I didn’t have all the facts. When you listen, you’ll hear me miss what is now an obvious question.

ARN Media had just announced O’Connell’s Melbourne-based Gold FM breakfast show was going live nationally. After last week’s announcement that Brendan Jones and Amanda Keller were vacating their Gold FM Sydney breakfast show for a shift to drive, it was clear that O’Connell would be networking into both cities, but the national move was a surprise.

I took the announcement at face value. The technical problem I focused on was that of the time difference.

Depending on time of year, when the show kicks off in Melbourne at 6am, that would be 3am in Perth. Or 5am in Queensland. Or 5.30am in Adelaide. But the announcement was unequivocal (and, as I’ll explain further down, misleading): “This is the first time a commercial radio breakfast show will go live across the country.”

For a show that thrives on the conversation with callers, that would, I assumed, have to mean a longer show. Stay on air longer, until at least 11am Melbourne time perhaps, in order to be genuinely live. There’s precedent for running long. Over on Kiis FM, stablemates Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson usually stay well beyond their official finish time.

Alternatively, as a half way house (and admittedly not properly live), shortly after 9am in Melbourne, record a bunch of talk breaks to cover the next two hours.

The practicality of time zones is already a reality for broadcasters. The likes of ABC Radio National, and the TV networks, broadcast their shows as live, on a time delay. But when something big enough is breaking, they go fully live for their west coast audiences.

But the assumption that I - and the rest of the industry - made was that ARN Media was planning to put The Christian O’Connell Show to air in each market on one of their existing stations.

That had been the plan when ARN was looking to capture Triple M in its failed Southern Cross Austereo takeover bid.

The new national plan was most intriguing in Perth where ARN’s 96FM leads the market with a 14.8% audience share. However, 96FM is more closely aligned with ARN Media’s Kiis network branding than Gold. ARN shares a second licence in the city with Nova Entertainment.

And the existing 96FM breakfast show, featuring Dean Clairs and Lisa Shaw, underperforms compared to the rest of the station, sitting third in its time slot. Dropping in The Christian O’Connell Show would be a bold move but plausible.

At the very least, with one licence in the market, ARN Media appeared to have selected O’Connell over the Kyle & Jackie O Show to lead its national networking strategy. To use the Formula One analogy, where each team has two drivers, ARN had chosen O’Connell as its number one driver.

But the plan appeared anything but fully formed.

As you’ll hear O’Connell concede during the interview: “The Perth side, we’re still working out the best way to do that. It might sound like ‘If you’ve been talking about this for seven years, why haven’t you sorted that out?’”

In truth, it’s not going to be a national show. Or at least not on radios nationally. Outside of Sydney and Melbourne the show will be DAB only. Disingenuously, the word DAB did not appear in the announcement.

Almost nobody listens to DAB. And for fans of O’Connell in other cities, they can already stream the show anyway.

DAB ratings are so low that Commercial Radio Australia doesn’t even publish the average listening numbers, only cumulative audience - the number of people who merely tune in at some point across the week. On DAB, the station 96FM 80s has a cume of just 61,000. That’s compared to a cume for the main 96FM of 506,000.

So why pretend the show is national when it is not?

That’s where ARN has made a hash of its communications.

They were bounced into it after Jones and Keller decided to tell their listeners they were being moved to drive time. Reading between the lines, it’s clear the duo would rather have stayed in breakfast.

As O’Connell says in the interview: “Things have been jump started a bit. We were meant to be announcing this in a couple of weeks time.”

ARN should have waited until it got its story straight.

The mere fact of Christian O’Connell broadcasting live into Sydney was interesting enough, and a credible first step to a national audience.

But that’s not what this move represents.

Instead, it potentially sets him up for failure.

If ARN had presented it to the market as a two-city show, then Sydney and Melbourne would have been seen as the battleground - and, incidentally, one where O’Connell has the craft, talent and work ethic to win.

It could even have been accompanied by the supplemental message that the show will additionally be available on DAB in those other markets. But it can’t pretend that the show is fully in each of those markets - advertisers won’t accept it anyway.

Now, unless ARN rapidly changes its messaging, each survey will be accompanied by terrible comparisons in Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane.

Presented as a national sell, it will cause confusion about what should be a simple buy. Marketers and media agencies won’t buy the national story until it’s a genuine national story.

What a waste of what should have been good news from ARN.

Seven share price decimated

Seven West Media and Vinyl Group both took big hits on the ASX today, losing 10% and 7.6% respectively.

SWM’s price of 14c is close to its low point of 12c it briefly hit in April. Vinyl Group is at its lowest point since May.

Meanwhile Nine, which is currently the biggest locally based media and marketing stock, rose by 1.2% to a market capitalisation of $2.7bn.

The Unmade Index rose slightly by 0.15% to 586.2 points.