Southern Cross Austereo deepens listener insights

Southern Cross Austereo (SCA) is leveraging first-party data to boost its listener experience whilst driving profitability and scale.

Head of data and analytics Cam Strachan said the company’s digital audio ecosystem, the LiSTNR Audience Network, has created a tailored user experience by bringing together a single view of listeners to personalise its offering.

SCA’s free LiSTNR app offers radio streaming, podcasts and a curated music service, with currently 1.4 million registered users.

“With access to even more data and real-time data, advanced targeting is now possible, Strachan said at a Salesforce Digital Café event in Sydney.  

“Previously, the team could only know that you were part of the listener database and you’d ticked the box to say you were interested in a certain radio station," he said.

“Now we can combine that with their listening behaviour and favourites and things like that, to do much more advanced targeting.”

Strachan said SCA is starting to optimise customer notifications across its channels.

Over the next year, SCA will also be rolling out AI-based user churn prediction models.

SCA built out a single view of its listeners by using its Salesforce Data Cloud platform to offer more personalised recommendations and listener content through its app, emails and website.  

It has also produced data visualisations and dashboards using the Marketing Cloud Intelligence platform to help define information from “anonymous devices” and broadcast statistics.

Strachan said the company “obviously” wants “to increase revenue and profitability” and boost the “listening hours" of its digital audience.

“We want you to come back because we're showing you new content that you're really engaged with and you want listen to," he said.

"The parallel product to that is content discoverability; 600 podcasts are really hard to show in a mobile app stream.

"You need AI-driven personalisation to surface that content so that wherever you [or] I go on the platform, we get different recommendations and maybe we show you something from our library that you haven't heard before.”

He added customer engagement is “really important” as the ecosystem goes beyond radio.

The company has also managed to reduce time-to-market and manual effort for its commercial team, cutting five days per month in report generation time.