The ABC Innovation Lab is always talking to young people, Anna Dixon from ABC came to talk to the Radiodays Asia about just this. Young people think about what they watched when they were young and what their parents watched but there is no clear path for them back to ABC services. Work on connections now, to capture the young people in the future Young people aren’t in control of discovery they rely on algorithms and because of this don’t think about what they are consuming in terms of genres. You need to be in their feeds to capture their attention. Young people also like to go down sub-culture rabbit holes, currently their content consumption is a ‘cocktail’ of sub-cultures, interest vs aspirational vs gaming – many yps want to be a gamer or youtuber. Media platforms are where their stars are, they resonate with influencers they don’t recall where the videos come from but do know where the influencers are. They rely on friends, family and influencers. Personality led, unfiltered, extreme, colourful, imaginative, lo-fi content, reactive to trends – just some of the reasons why young people connect with influencers. How do we get this into radio? We need to create connections with the radio brand therefore the Talent Fund was created at the ABC – ABC need to learn from these talents. This initiative helps up skill the team in ABC also give a great experience to the talent of working at ABC. This strategy is also good for the Content team in ABC in terms of recruitment, content, measurement and research. How do you then get the talent and content to the eyeballs for young people? A marriage of ABC and platforms needed to be compatible. TikTok is one of the favoured platforms as it is just one account as TikTok is reactive to different watchers. TikTok is their incubator, this team has the support of many different teams within ABC, different sub-brands have 3 months to test their content, if it works then they can have their own accounts. So what has worked Explainers, Live, News and How To. The sub brands have seen followers triple, video views are up to 12m, up from 10m from June 2022. But what can you learn from TikTok – There is huge range, short modular segments, continuous flow and serve unique sets of content which is similar to ABC streams. Streams are short content segments; this allows the ease of radio but personalise and skip between content. ABC Streams can show a huge about of topics within the Stream, flowing across topics and tone really appeals to young people. Short form audio really interests them too, so the Streams really work in terms of tone also. Audio discovery in Streams appealed to young people for example they enjoyed 3min podcast taster, left the Stream and then listened to the whole podcast. Young people also had very strong views and a unique set of content for each person e.g., Skippable radio stations just for you – for young people this is a baseline expectation. Anna ended by giving her key take aways which were – How can you create video to support audio, you need to get in front of their eyes, how to leverage influencers, create models that support experimentation.
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