SCA centralise their digital content teams

We hear that some changes to the structure of Southern Cross Austereo's digital content teams have occurred over recent weeks. I caught up with their Director of Digital & Innovation Clive Dickens who gives us the lowdown ….
 

Clive: We are seeing unbelievable growth in traffic at the moment as we are reporting each month – social, mobile and online. So what we’re doing, we’re centralising all of our national digital content in a Melbourne hub. It’s actually a Melbourne and Sydney hub, but the majority of people will work in Melbourne. We have all the design and development and strategy teams in Sydney and all of the content team in Melbourne.

We had a small number of posts that were positioned around the cap cities over the last couple of years, producing digital content locally. We’ve removed all of those posts to Melbourne and Sydney. Some people have decided not to move with the opportunity but it’s not about scale back, it’s far from it, we haven’t lost any heads, it’s a further investment.

We know where our growth is coming from. On Triple M that growth is football and sport. On Today it’s shows and celebrity (Scoopla). So we’re effectively hubbing our digital content because it doesn’t really matter where somebody is based other than getting the right content direction. Dave Cameron (Head of Today Network Content) and Mike Fitzpatrick (Head of the Triple M Network) are both based in Melbourne. Rhys Holleran (CEO), Steve Kelly (CFO) and our head of marketing are all based in Melbourne. I’m based in Sydney with Dobbo and then Chris Johnson (the new Digital Content & Product Director) is based in Melbourne, so we’re basically creating a resourced up content hub to capitalise on this amazing growth we’re seeing.

That does mean a select number of our cap cities won’t have a local digital content person on site anymore but it does mean there’ll be more people in Melbourne working on digital content than ever before.

Whether you’re hubbing music, you’re hubbing commercial production, national sales, finance, this is not a new phenomena. Broadcast content is a hybrid – some is local, some is hubbed. The number 1 radio station in Perth is a station from Sydney, triple j. It’s about actually consolidating and increasing our growth.

For us it’s not even about cap cities, businesses like Gold Coast and Hobart are bigger businesses than Adelaide anyway and they’ve never had any local digital content. So as we roll out our new website templates from the metro markets into the bigger regional markets, it’s all about generating revenue and shareholder value out of our digital business rather than replicating everything that exists in every cap city.

It’s basically the digital business maturing in exactly the same way the broadcast business has over the last 20 years, which is local where local counts, national where national counts and using the best of your resources.

The world's changing bloody fast and, as people aggregate to great content, that's what we hope we'll produce more of with this decision.