Lizzie Young on unifying Australia’s audio landscape and withstanding ‘extreme’ financial pressure

Commercial Radio and Audio has finally launched CRA Audio ID, its one-stop shop for marketers to buy, track, and manage digital audio campaigns across live streaming radio and podcasts.

Announced in February, and originally slated for a June release, Audio ID is promising advertisers access to 14.7 million monthly listeners across the country’s major commercial audio networks: ARN, Nine Audio, Nova, and Southern Cross Austereo. It is now live and trading via Display and Video 360, Google’s demand-side platform.

In a wide-ranging interview which you can listen to on The Mumbrellcast, Lizzie Young, CRA’s CEO, sat down with Tim Burrowes to discuss the roadmap and benefits for Audio ID. Young also confirmed the “extreme” financial costs involved in fighting CRA’s royalty rate lawsuit with PPCA — including cancelling its long-running ACRA awards — and why she chose to spend her marketing budget for ‘The Power of Radio’ campaign on the very digital platforms it is battling for advertiser dollars.

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“This is a really significant point in time for the industry,” Young says of Audio ID. “For the first time ever, clients and agencies will be able to buy campaigns across radio and podcasting … across those four networks, and they’ll be able to deploy their investment and optimise reach and frequency.”

Young said Audio ID is “about bringing that pool of inventory together to give the scale, which effectively enables us to compete against global platforms”.

Audio ID allows advertisers to measure reach, manage frequency, and buy at scale across Australian commercial streaming radio and podcasts

“We’ve effectively made the ease of transaction equivalent to what you can trade with a global platform. But we’ve also managed to come together through collaboration across all of our members to deliver scale that we haven’t [and] wouldn’t have individually.”

It’s a powerful end to a year that has seen significant challenges for the Australian commercial radio sector.

The industry is embroiled in a long-running court case where it is arguing to keep in place a 1% radio royalty cap. Collection agency the Phonographic Performance Company Of Australia (PPCA) claims the cap is outdated, and is arguing to impose a higher royalty rate each time a song is played on radio.

The “extreme” financial strain of the ongoing legal saga resulted in the CRA postponing the Australian Commercial Radio Awards for the first time in its 36-year history, then deciding to cancel the event permanently.

‘It was a postponement to start with,” Young says. “We needed to do that because, all the best laid plans, once you are in a legal situation, there are things that escalate beyond what anyone thought was ever possible.”

The forced postponement of the 2025 event — as well as the sale of CRA’s office, which Young declines to comment on — led to some reconsideration of the value of a glitzy awards ceremony.

“That then did give us the opportunity to look at the CRAs … and consider whether it was the right investment to be making at this current point in time.”

It turns out it wasn’t, and the CRA announced in September it would be permanently canning the event.

“Whilst I can absolutely understand people’s disappointment, I fundamentally believe it was the right decision for the industry at this point in time, as did all of the board,” Young says.

Kyle and Jackie O at the 2022 ACRAs

There were other woes in the radio world in 2025. Both SCA and ARN made hundreds of roles redundant between the two networks, the latter as part of a $40 million cost-cutting exercise, and the former to shore up the books in preparation for a sale.

Despite this, Young remains optimistic about the future of the audio industry.

“Look, the reality is the Australian media industry has lost 70 cents in every dollar of revenue that it used to have, because it now goes offshore with the global platforms,” she says.

“That means everybody is scrambling to achieve revenue outcomes with much less money in the market … Everyone’s had to rebalance their books to deal with that, because that’s what happens when revenue goes down and costs are going up, which they are for many businesses. Profit becomes the challenge and you have to make changes to adjust for that.”

Young says “that has been done” and feels it would be “foolish to say that this industry will not continually continue to evolve. There’ll be changes in the type of roles [at the networks].”

“But fundamentally, do I see revenue growth in audio? Absolutely. When you see our audience numbers and you think about our digital transformation agenda and what we’re doing to become as easy to trade with, there is no question in my mind that audio can take a larger share of the addressable market.”

The exodus of advertisers towards the overseas digital platforms adds an extra layer of irony to the roll-out of CRA’s ‘Power of Audio’ campaign, which touted the power of advertising in radio and podcasting.

In order to have the desired impact, CRA needed to direct the majority of its marketing budget for the ‘Power of Audio’ campaign to the likes of Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, and Google, in order to “target marketers that spend a lot of money”.

Young explains the apparent disconnect between the message and the medium it was seen on.

“It is the thing that I struggle with the most,” Young admits, of having to support the advertising channels that are threatening its own. She notes the campaign also ran across commercial radio and podcasts, but says “the issue with that is, if you only advertise the power of audio campaign on audio platforms, you are arguably talking to marketers who probably already have a predisposition to audio.

“So, if you want to target marketers that spend a lot of money in the platforms, then you have to advertise on the platforms to get their attention. Otherwise you’re talking to yourself and you’re talking to converted customers.”

The conversation also spanned a number of other topics, including whether or not Young feels the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and its complicated, co-regulatory process is fit for purpose; what was behind the recent decision to remove the Top Publishers ranking system from the Podcast Ranker; and Young’s own career ambitions within the radio and audio industry.

You can listen to the entire conversation below or on by subscribing to the Mumbrellacast.