Duncan Campbell: “I think it’s too early to call this thing. The battle is still on”

“I can’t say this forever, but I think it’s too early to call this thing. The audiences haven’t made up their mind. They’re still becoming familiar with Kyle and Jackie O.”

ARN’s Chief Content Officer Duncan Campbell remains unwavering in his belief that Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O Henderson will grow on Melbourne listeners. It’ll just take time.

Four months after exploding onto Melbourne’s airwaves, and in their first full survey, the polarising Sydney duo saw some share improvement in GfK Survey 5, up from 5.9 percent to 6.1. But their cume fell from 502,000 to 491,000.

Jase & Lauren, the very show which made way for Kyle & Jackie O on KIIS 101.1, grew its share to 9.9 to be the #1 FM Breakfast show in Melbourne.

The Nova team leapfrogged Gold 104.3’s The Christian O’Connell Show (down 2.5 points to an 8.3 per cent share) and Fox FM’s Fifi, Fev & Nick (up 0.1 point to a 9.6).

In an interview with our sister publication RadioInfo, Campbell says there’s a still a lot of floating cume, and a lot of settling yet to happen.

“My take on the Melbourne market – and I’ll include the Christian O’Connell result as well – is that we’ve got five stations with a cume above a million … people move from station to station.”

Of O’Connell’s result, Campbell says “We haven’t spent money on marketing him as much as we have with Kyle and Jackie O, so there’s the lack of top-of-mind awareness for him, which resulted in the decline today.”

Of the decision to network Kyle & Jackie O to Melbourne, Campbell has long referred to the city’s Breakfast radio wars as a long game, played slowly.

“I’m just not convinced that a show that can pull in 750,000 listeners a week in Sydney can’t at least do close to that ultimately in Melbourne.”

Campbell says the audiences aren’t really that different.

“I’m talking about the heartland listeners of Kyle and Jackie O. So I think as Melbourne becomes more familiar with them, and they get to understand the show more, it becomes quite an addictive listen. I think that’s when we’ll start to see some real growth down there.”

Campbell cites The Christian O’Connell Show as an example.

“People said that would never work. We put him into Melbourne and eighteen months later he was #1 FM. We’ve been there before.”

Campbell says Sandilands understands it’s a new show to Melbourne and that the audience there will take time to get to know it.

“We believe that it’s going to work. As I said before, the audiences are not that much different. We’ve got to get past the sexualised content focus and look at the real show, but over time, that perception will fall away, ’cause they do some fantastic content other than the sexualised stuff. It’s a positive sign today, but it’s still a long way to go.”

“It’s still early days. Let’s see who’s still standing and who’s not in the middle of 2025.”

“The battle is still on. It hasn’t been won.”