‘Don’t be fooled by imbeciles’: Kyle Sandilands still believes in Melbourne
ARN’s CEO Ciaran Davis is blunt when bringing up the elephant in the room. “It’s been 12 months. And it’s an absolute unmitigated disaster.”
He’s talking about the success — or lack thereof — of the Kyle and Jackie O show in Melbourne, Australia’s biggest radio market.
It’s unusual for the boss of a radio network to be so candid, and even more-so when he is directing the comments at the show’s hosts, Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson. In this case, however, they agree with his assessment.
The judgment was levelled at the pair during a lively Q+A at IMAA’s Sound Byte event on Thursday afternoon, held at ARN’s North Sydney headquarters in a neon-lit room that reminded Sandilands “of a strip club in the Cross”. Sandilands, the equal-highest paid radio presenter in the nation (with Henderson), turned it back on his boss.
“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. None of this, ‘Oh, put your little toe in the water’. ‘Oh, we’re going to rebrand Gold, so let’s not use the marketing money to tell everyone that they’re on.’
“It’s just a disaster. But it’s growing at a big speed for us.”
Davis, Sandilands, and Henderson.
This growth, Sandilands admits, isn’t borne out in the survey results. The pair launched in April 2024 with a 5.1% share of the audience in Melbourne breakfast. 14 months later, they remain at 5.1. Kyle believes this is a flaw of the ratings system itself.
“What you see is the [percentage] share in the survey,” he notes. “You don’t get that on TV. You get numbers on TV. How many people watched MAFS last night? We know the number. We don’t get a share of the audience. It’s a dumb way of doing it.
“But the people that are listening to us, their time spent listening to us has tripled what they listened to the other shows. And I understand why.
“There’s quality shows in Melbourne, like the Fox breakfast show. The Nova show, that’s fine. Although they’ve got a bit of ‘woe is me,’ because they were shit when they were on our station. No c*** listened. No one. And they went to Nova and went, ‘Oh, we got fired by the big, rich Sydney people. Oh, boo-hoo.’
“Those Melbourne people went for a little bit of sympathy.”
Sandilands is referring to Jase and Lauren, hosted by Jason Hawkins and Lauren Phillips. The pair previously held the breakfast slot at KIIS in Melbourne, before being bumped to make way for Kyle and Jackie O. They were picked up by Nova, and subsequently climbed to the top of the hotly contested Melbourne FM breakfast ratings.
Amusingly, Sandilands takes credit for their success at Nova.
“Now, I know Jase. He was my bitch for about 20 years in radio,” he claims. “Taught him everything. Met him from when he was 16. He’s a good operator. But that’s going to wear thin. The shows are a bit weak. They only speak for three or four minutes and then play an ad break.
“Everything’s timed. We’re a bit more free-flowing. If we need to talk about something for 20 minutes, we’ll talk about it for 20 minutes. Jackie won’t be in the middle of a great story and I go [adopts radio presenter voice], ‘Ah-hah, 20 to 8. Cheers!’
“What about the rest of the story? Oh, no, we have to get the news on time. We don’t even put news on at the top of the hour or bottom of the hour, because everyone already really knows the news.
“If it was up to me, I’d get rid of news. No news is good news. We’ve been saying that for years.”
Sandilands isn’t at all worried about the show’s future success in the city.
“Melbourne will grow,” he declares. “The people that have glued on are sticking for the whole show, what I call the super fan mentality. That’s all I really care about.”
Sandilands also addressed what he claims is a targeted campaign against their show by MFW — short for Mad F****** Witches — an online activist group that describes itself as “Australia’s biggest grassroots movement dedicated to fighting media lies.” He mentioned the group’s efforts on-air a few weeks ago, which Davis noted was a rare case of him taking the bait.
“You know, we’re not for everyone,” Sandilands notes. “I don’t like certain servos. But I’m not going to make an activist website and convince people to never go to that particular servo – because I’ve got a life and I’m not a loser.
“But these people, and rightly so, everyone’s got their own drum they want to beat. But when I found out they were actually making up stories, getting people to lie, bombarding clients that are advertising with us with fake outrage, and saying, ‘Well, we were going to come down and buy a Kia. But we heard that you’re advertising with them, so we’re not. We’re going to buy a Toyota now.’ You just think, ‘Well, people aren’t dumb. They’re not going to…’ But there’s hundreds of these emails going out. And, I think, certain people get nervous.
“I’ve said to agency people before, don’t be fooled by imbeciles. Your job is to make sure your client achieves the great success with their campaigns, regardless of where they’re advertising. Whether it’s with us, whether it’s with Nova, the TV, it doesn’t really matter. But come to where the people are. We’ve got the listeners. They’re the people that are buying, you know, fridges, freezers, cars, holidays. That’s who listens to us.”
He says he was shocked when he opened up on-air about his experiences fleeing domestic violence as a child, only to be derided by the group.
“They said I was disingenuous, and that I made the whole thing up. And I thought, ‘Oh, they’re just beyond any sort of reason’. We can’t have a discussion with these people because they are just looney tunes.”
He says his manager, Bruno Bouchet, claimed “they actually earn money off hating me and Jackie”.
“That’s how they earn,” he continues. “So if there’s no hate towards me, there’s no gifts from their followers … now, to me, that’s disingenuous. But I’m not spending my days fighting some group of ladies in regional Victoria who hate me. I don’t mind if they hate me.”
Sandilands dismisses any concerns about brand safety from Melbourne advertisers.
“I don’t stop the ad breaks and start shit-canning the ads at any stage,” he says. “I mean, when we’re dealing with a client, we’re not stupid. We are not going to shit all over that and risk that.
“You know, we pick our time. We need to look after our clients and we’re not going to do anything to jeopardise that.”
He then starts pointing the finger again.
“I know other radio stations in the past have used the scare tactic. ‘Oh, you don’t want to be over there on the dangerous show. You want to be over here on the safe show that no-one gives a shit about.’ What is that? Like, what fool would believe that? What you want to do is get your message to as many people as possible. No-one’s listening to our show and thinking, ‘Oh, I’m not going to buy that packet of Twisties because they’re advertising.’ It’s not real. It’s a fake thing that other people use as leverage to take ads off us.
“What I’ve found out is people that really detest us have usually never even heard us. They’ve heard something about us or read some lie in the newspaper. A lot of journalists don’t like me. I think that’s my own fault for calling them out on their lies and manipulation over the years.”
The pair say they’ve built an intimate relationship with their Sydney listenership over a quarter of a century that protects them from the ebbs and flows of the radio industry.
“It definitely is a love-hate thing,” Henderson notes. “The people who love us love us. And the people who don’t, they’ve decided, and they’re just not going to be a fan. I would much rather that than an audience that doesn’t mind us but can also tune out at any time.”
Sandilands’ assessment of the hate: “They’re losers at the ABC.”
The duo have also been written off before, noting how their former network 2Day FM warned them the glory days were over while their ratings were still climbing.
“In breakfast radio, [with] Sydney being such a competitive market, you’re told that there’s only five years max before they tire of you and move on,” Henderson says.
“Remember they told us that at 2DayFM? ‘You’ve been here ten years, your time is up’,” Sandilands says. “I thought, ‘I don’t think so. Just because Wendy [Harmer] and [Lawrence] Mooney didn’t last more than ten years.
“And that was 15 years ago, before we came here.”
Despite claiming to already know the answer, Davis asks directly: “Do you think Melbourne will be a success?”
“Yeah, I do,” Sandilands says. “But I’ve believed that since the first day.
“I’ve got no doubt it’ll work. We should have blasted us nationally from day one and just spent millions of dollars on marketing.
“But you and I will talk about that again,” he tells Davis. “And again, and again, and again, and again.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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Of course narcissists are incapable of taking self-responsibility.
And of course over a thousand advertisers flee when they see the sort of inane, damaging content they’re sharing the same air as. All it takes is actual verbatim quotes from the show (eg the infamous “is it her partner or her dad?” one) and like any rational human being with a moral compass, they run away quickly.
Poor little Kyle is getting all testerical here.
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Sandilands is offensive. Congratulations Melbourne, keep them failing.
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Once again, the tail appears to wag the dog over at ARN.
And the shareholders just shake their heads in bewilderment as they see their investment continue to evaporate in front of their eyes.
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what a cherub
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Disgusting. Did anyone walk out?
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Kyle talks a good game and the bluster is impressive considering he would be losing energy on this Melb experiment – but it’s hard to see how it can work in melbourne. the share hasn’t moved, the only hope they have is a tonne of Melb radio listeners are still unaware of them.
The reality is more likely that Melb audiences are either detractors who will never switch, or have sampled it and gone back to their original choice.
Hard to see how it will edge up in the ratings. Meanwhile its the biggest single liability financially ARN has.
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Melbourne used to be the most provocative and rambunctious radio market in Australia.It is now utterly safe and beige -just like the entire state of Victoria.
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To be fair to Kyle, he’s right about the ad breaks on Nova. I enjoy listening to Jase and Lauren (and Clint), but for every 10 minutes of songs or commentary, there’s 5 minutes of ads. I listen really early, when they start at 6am, and I’ve started to switch off completely due to the number of ads.
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It’s a dying platform and the world is moving on. Commercial Radio and FTA TV do an incredible job pumping up their own self importance with ratings that fall drastically short of most YouTube videos and endless bus ads for “Robbo, Bobbo and a Lauren” as one of the 48 versions of a footballer, a comedian, and someone who was on FTA TV show talking about school drop offs or some bloke who stood too close at a urinal.
Talk to anyone on the street and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone under 60 who watches FTA TV or listens to broadcast radio.
THEN you’ve got these two. It’s effectively layer cake of decrepit fails.
Time for them to accept they’re not young, they’re not cool, they’re not capable of generating cash like they used to, and no one is listening.
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