SCA’s John Kelly: “I feel very excited about the future”

At Southern Cross Austereo, there’s a motto: Proudly national, fiercely local.

And SCA CEO John Kelly says he and his team are doing their best to stay true to it, given some very testing times of late.

In a matter of months, a takeover bid by ARN Media went south, with private equity firm Anchorage Capital Partners walking away from the proposed deal.

SCA then rejected an alternative proposal from ARN to acquire its assets.

Kelly spoke to Radio Today after the release of SCA’s FY24 results, where the company saw a 43% gain in Digital revenue, helping to offset a 1.7% fall in broadcast radio revenues, and a 8.6% drop in TV.

“We are seeing growth in audio. We are very excited about LiSTNR and attacking the digital revenue dollars,” Kelly says.

The planned sale of SCA’s regional television assets will enable the company to focus on optimising its radio and digital audio assets, spearheaded by LiSTNR, HIT and Triple M.

But Kelly admits it’s been a difficult year.

“The events of October with the ARN consortium really disrupted our year. That went from effectively October though to April-May, almost eight months.”

“I think the fact that we’ve been able to really get some significant growth … and control our costs … I think is a testament to the work of everyone at SCA.”

“I actually feel very excited about the future.”

Kelly says the SCA sales team really buckled down over the December/January period.

“We’ve had six months of metro revenue share growth since that time. We expect that to continue.”

“All I can say is, I’m proud of our team for not only working through that, but actually improving off that into the second half of FY24 and into FY25.”

Are the ARN negotiations dead in the water, at least for now?

“There is no corporate activity other than announced sale of the TV assets,” says Kelly. We’ve got a business to run and we’re actually enjoying the free air to run our business at the moment.”

With cost cutting at networks across the board, keeping morale up among SCA staff is front of mind.

“It’s something that myself and the leadership team find challenging, as I’m sure all leadership teams do in media,” says Kelly.

“It’s a difficult time. It’s one of the reasons we don’t come out and talk about ‘there’s going to be X amount of roles removed or X amount of costs removed,’ because that’s alarmist.”

“What we try to do is, when there’s people leave, we look at opportunities … do we really need to replace that role? And we use churn as a way of reducing that cost, as opposed to impacting people’s lives by making them redundant.”

“I’m not saying we don’t make people redundant, but we try and use all measures, and protect our people.”