ARN’s plan to take Christian O’Connell national
Christian O’Connell wants to go national with his show. The bosses at ARN certainly think he has the appeal, and he has made no secret of his wish to expand the show’s live breakfast audience beyond the Melbourne market he has wooed and won over the past seven years. So, when will it happen?
Lauren Joyce, chief audience and content officer at ARN, tells Mumbrella that his potential to attract a live national breakfast audience hasn’t gone unnoticed.
“We’ve always said that the show has appeal beyond the market that it’s in,” Joyce says.
“You know, we’re really pleased with the success that we’ve had in Melbourne with the Christian O’Connell show, and then certainly, where the show is syndicated at night already across the rest of the network, it delivers solid numbers.”
This is the other factor in O’Connell’s favour. He already has a national audience. Since April 2020, a one-hour ‘best of’ package of that morning’s show has been syndicated at 7pm each evening across Gold 101.7 in Sydney, 97.3 FM in Brisbane, Mix 102.3 in Adelaide, and 96FM in Perth. In early 2022, the show also started airing as a 5pm highlights package across seven stations in regional Victoria and NSW.
So, the national audience has been primed. But O’Connell wants to go live. When signing a deal in 2024 to extend his radio contact to 2029, he made sure he was contracted to ARN, rather than to Melbourne’s Gold FM, allowing the show to be simulcast across various stations in the ARN stable.
Christian O’Connell in studio
“I’ve signed a long-term deal with ARN. My goals are very clear,” he told Mumbrella last year.
“I want the show to be more available and that means outside of Melbourne and live. That’s really important to me, really important. It’s nothing to do with domination or trying to be number one somewhere else. It’s about just making it more available. That’s what is in my heart. I’d really like that.
“The different shapes and forms and permutations of that … there’s a lot of different ways that it can happen. But that is my goal [for] the next few years – for the show to be more available.”
Joyce says the move to national is an inevitable one.
“We certainly think that, yes, there is a life for the show outside of Melbourne,” she tells Mumbrella. “As to when that happens? You know we haven’t locked down any plans at this stage.”
Another national drawcard is the insertion of former Today reporter Alex Cullen, who has just signed onto the show as its sports reporter. Today is just his third shift on air, so Cullen’s chemistry with O’Connell remains untested. But it’s looking good according to Joyce.
“We’re hugely optimistic about what he can bring to the show,” Joyce says. “He brings a really fresh perspective and life-stage to the show. He sounds great on air. He’s fitting in already. We’re optimistic about what it will allow us to to do with the show, moving forward.”
Lauren Joyce
Of course, O’Connell isn’t the only big name at ARN that has expressed a wish to go live and national in the breakfast slot.
At a recent industry event at ARN’s North Sydney headquarters, Kyle Sandilands took aim at ARN CEO Ciaran Davis (albeit in a lighthearted way) for the show’s failure to launch in Melbourne.
“Well, I blame you guys, in all honesty,” Sandilands tells Davis. “I blame you guys. What we should have done is rolled us out nationally from day one, put our balls in our hand, and f****** moved forward.”
Later in the conversation, Sandilands repeated this claim. “We should have blasted us nationally from day one and just spent millions of dollars on marketing.”
Again, Joyce agrees the show has national appeal
“I think the interesting thing about the Kyle and Jackie O Show is that the 90% of the content that’s in that show is universally entertaining, so similar to Christian’s show, in that it’s not necessarily tethered to one market.
Davis, Sandilands, and Henderson at ARN’s North Sydney studios.
“Yes, I think the show does have appeal beyond the markets that it’s in. But we need to make Melbourne a success before we can take that show anywhere else.”
This may be starting to happen. The show jumped by half a percentage point in Tuesday’s ratings book, to reach 5.6% of the audience. It’s nothing to write home about, but it’s process.
“We’re really pleased to see that,” Joyce says. “And, I do think that that’s the result of the team focusing on the core pillars of the show. We had a lot of content in there over this last survey period that was celebrity focused, and we had a number of cash tactics as part of the show, but delivered in a typical Kyle and Jackie O way – so bigger than anybody else. We’ve gone back to focusing on those reputational drivers, as part of the show.”
Joyce said the next step is to convert the cumulative listenership to ‘time spent listening’, and then continuing to repair the reputational damage that may be scaring some of the potential listeners off.
“Obviously, there’s been a lot of press coverage down there, and I think that a lot of judgment made based on what those headlines say, versus people actually sampling the show and and determining whether they like it or not.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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