ARN upfront: Sensible meets madcap with a touch of TV

ARN’s new boss Michael Stephenson is a TV guy, no two ways about it.

At a pre-upfront media briefing early in the week, he recounted his first ever corporate presentation at the radio network’s offices in North Sydney earlier in the year, when he asked someone where he was meant to look while delivering his speech.

The answer: at the audience. It seems obvious, unless you’ve spent the past two decades working for the country’s biggest TV network.

At Nine, he would have delivered the message directly down the barrel of a camera, bypassing the audience in the room in favour of the unseen viewers — but ARN is an audio company, and therefore had never thought about television screens. As Stephenson explained, he has since installed cameras in the downstairs presentation room at ARN, turning future talks into productions rather than presentations.

This was all a rather charming preamble for the main message of its upfront, which is: ARN is an entertainment company.

The dancers in the foyer at the ARN upfront were disconcerting (Mumbrella)

Not a radio network. Not even an “audio” company, as many who have expanded from the dial to the digital realm are now portraying themselves. ARN makes videos and content for online; it hosts live music events, singles cruises, and local run clubs; it is the Australian licensee of the world’s biggest podcasting platform — and yeah, I guess it also runs 58 radio stations across 33 markets, plus dozens of specialty DAB+ channels.

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Throughout 2025, arch rival SCA has insisted many times it is “all about audio”, after finally shedding its various regional TV assets, only to merge with Seven West Media, a company that spans television, print, and internet news, and is decidedly not all about audio.

ARN is no longer all about audio, either — and they’re shouting it from the rooftops — but interestingly, a lot of the company’s biggest announcements certainly sounded like radio news.

Top story of the hour is that ARN’s two radio networks, Gold and KIIS, are going national.

Jonesy and Amanda with the man who pushed them out of breakfast, Christian O’Connell (Mumbrella)

In January, Sydney’s WSFM was renamed Gold 101.7, with the rebranding ironically announced a few hours after the station found out it had topped the Sydney ratings for the first time in its 46-year run. At the same time, it also quietly brought Adelaide’s easy-listening station Cruise 1323 into the Gold Network, keeping the cruisy name but changing the logo to feature the same font and gold plectrum as the other Gold stations.

In 2026, ARN will complete the transition. Perth’s 96FM will become Gold96FM, Adelaide’s Cruise1323 will be Gold1323 with updated music to boot, while a Gold  DAB+ station will launch in Brisbane.

In regards to the younger-skewing KIIS network, Adelaide’s Mix102.3 will become KIIS 102.3, and a KIIS DAB+ station will launch in Perth.

Talentwise, ARN have raided the Nova lineup, poaching Ben Harvey and Liam Stapleton from the network’s national Late Drive show, and inserting them into the KIIS 102.3 Adelaide breakfast slot.

Kent “Smallzy” Small has also jumped ship, leaving his national Smallzy’s Surgery show at Nova to host The Smallzy Show across two national timeslots on KIIS — 3pm to 4pm, and 7pm to 9pm — which all effectively leaves a four-hour nightly gap in Nova’s national schedule, with 6pm-10pm up for grabs.

Elsewhere, Craig “Lowie” Lowe will host Brisbane’s KIIS 97.3 breakfast show, and Kyle and Jackie O will be helming breakfast at KIIS’ new DAB+ Perth station.

Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson were among the first ARN talent to speak (Mumbrella)

It’s not quite the national show that Sandilands has been banging on about, but the pair will be bringing Perth audiences beloved segments such as “I pee for iPod”,”piss yourself for Pink tickets”, and “guess which staff member is pissing”.

It’s a rather muted result for the company’s highest-paid employees, with ARN no doubt pumping the brakes on any planned expansion after seeing the pair fail to penetrate the Melbourne market over the past 18 months.

For an ego the size of Sandilands’, it must sting to see both Christian O’Connell and Jonesy and Amanda getting actual national shows on Gold. This will only fuel his ambition — the safe bet is that Lowie, Ben and Liam will have one calendar year to embed themselves into the hearts of listeners (not to be confused with Heart and Listnr) and the KIIS network, before Sandilands comes for their breakfasts.

But enough about radio. ARN is an entertainment company, after all. To this end, they have announced the biggest refresh of its iHeartRadio app which — irony of all ironies — models its functionality on the humble car radio.

The new app allows users to save up to 15 radio stations as presets (like a car radio), introduces a scan button that slides up and down the dial in search of a catchy song (like a car radio), features a live radio dial (like a car radio), and features lyrics on the screen for live radio (like the RSL down the road from yours that hosts karaoke every second Friday).

There’s also a built-in ranker that shows the most-listened to podcasts, offers trending playlists, and top artist radio stations, which looks to mirror both Apple’s podcast charts and Spotify’s music discovery tools.

ARN also announced a handful of canny podcast partnerships for iHeart.

Newly annointed chief sales officer Richard Hunwick

Top of the pile is a “premium podcast” deal with Are Media, the country’s biggest magazine publisher, home to the likes of Who, Elle, Home Beautiful, Belle, The Australian Women’s Weekly, Better Homes and Gardens, and Gourmet Traveller – all of which will (eventually) launch podcasts through iHeart.

So far, the only podcast we have details on is Marie Claire’s “You’re Gonna Want To Hear This”, an interview show hosted by the magazine’s editor Georgie McCourt, who will talk to the likes of Asher Keddie, Brittany Higgins, Grace Tame, Celeste Barber, and — oddly enough — ’90s supermodel Cindy Crawford.

It’s easy to envisage how such a partnership will play out. The magazine titles all lend themselves to both limited series runs and interesting, ongoing concepts — for example, The Women’s Weekly could launch a social history-based podcast that mines the magazine’s 92-year back catalogue for an unlimited source of “the way we were” episodes; Who is an easy fit for the popular celebrity gossip category; while Home Beautiful is a sponsored-content dreamscape of tasteful ads for tasteful drapes.

Anyway, enough about hypothetical podcasts, and back to the actual content.

ARN’s iHeart has also teamed up with Nine for Love Island Australia: Officially Unpacked, which needs no further explanation other than to point out that Nine’s former chief sales officer Michael Stephenson coming to ARN suggests an obvious alliance between the two broadcasters — especially considering the proposed Seven/SCA merger.

ARN has also teamed with Making The Call, an organisation with the goal of increasing the number of women working in sports media in Australia.

The partnership will spawn the country’s first women’s sports audio network, with the likes of netball stars Liz Ellis, Catherine Cox, and Carolyn Swindell; Olympian Chloe Dalton; journos Georgie Tunny, Brihony Dawson, and Abbey Gelmi; Survivor star and AFLW player Kirby Bentley, tennis legend Rennae Stubbs; and WNBA great Sheryl Swoopes all joining the network on various sports shows. Cricket Australia’s entire podcast slate will also be coming to iHeart.

There are also a number of new data partnerships with the likes of Westpac and Experian that help advertisers hit their targets with more granularity, but nothing as invasive as Foxtel’s gasp-inducing tool that will fill TV viewers’ digital shopping carts with ingredients from Great Australian Bake Off.

Keeping with the “we’re in the entertainment business” business, ARN is expanding its live concert series iHeart Live to 20 events across five capital cities and regional areas, and launching Run Club Rave — “where fitness, music, coffee, and community collide” in a mass of sweaty, puffed-out IRL events.

In case you needed reminders that Stephenson comes from Nine, ARN will also be launching a weird reality-TV style series named Save Our Pub that renovates an old Aussie pub; a thing called The Zone where 100 contestants compete to stay inside a circle (yup!) to win $100,000; and Kiised At Sea, which blends The Love Boat with Love Island with a singles cruise with an old school outside broadcast with icy-cold cans of pina colada.

Amy Shark played two songs towards the end of the upfront (Mumbrella)

In summary, ARN’s 2026 upfront was a mix of sensible and intuitive decisions — such as taking the two radio networks national; blending the nostalgia of radio with the convenience of digital streaming; keeping King Kyle in his kage (for now); and raiding Nova’s roster — and a few madcap, hopeful experiments — such as everything featured in the previous two paragraphs.

It’s an impressive 2026 upfront, after a season of conservative “if it ain’t broke” presentations from the TV networks. And with major radio rival SCA teaming up with Stephenson’s former major TV rival Seven, ARN seems ambitious, focused, and willing to experiment.

Hopefully, the major takeaway for advertisers and media won’t be “Gee, I haven’t thought of Cindy Crawford for a while.”

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