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Delta Award Winning Story

Southern Cross Austereo

Southern Cross Austereo Sets New Standards for Insight Democratization

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SCA Achieved

Direct ad sales support through customized consumer insights

Consolidation of results from 550+ surveys to build the largest audio advertising effectiveness database

12 years of continuous listener feedback helping to significantly grow both its customer and advertiser client base

Overview

Southern Cross Austereo, Australia's home for radio and audio content, has completely transformed audience and partner connections through deep consumer insights collected over the last 12 years.

Innovations like the Mood Monitor, a biannual national study, has helped SCA keep a consistent pulse on national and regional trends. This wealth of data, combined with audio landscape, brand health, and music studies allows them to uncover crucial insights into audience habits, interests, and expectations to drive content and advertising strategy.

Beyond commercial success, the team recently launched their internal “effectiveness database” that combines insights from over 550 brand lift studies conducted over the last decade. This unique and invaluable dataset is a key resource for partners offering SCA the clearest view of audio advertising effectiveness in Australia.

Program Goals:

Providing deep insights into SCA’s audiences for all internal teams for the purpose of content creation, improving audience share, and monetization
Democratize insights beyond the organization to include SCA’s advertiser partners to support campaign strategy and report on ad effectiveness
Measure and report national and regional audience trends in order to guide long term organization strategy

The SCA research team truly brings new meaning to insight democratization. For over a decade, they’ve built an organization-wide research ecosystem around their listener community, ensuring the teams across the business to stay connected to audience attitudes, experiences, and reactions to the brand and its content.

By tapping into this community, SCA gathers fast, ongoing feedback that helps every team create more relevant campaigns, products, and services. Their innovations include the long-running Mood Monitor project which has been measuring the moods and concerns of Australians biannually for 12 years, as well as their Trade Category Tracking program which gives the Trade team a 360° view of how marketers and media buyers are perceived by the audio category, directly shaping key commercial decisions.

SCA also extends this advantage to advertising partners by offering exclusive visibility into their audience’s insights. This differentiated access fuels successful partnerships and consistent repeat business.

Internally, SCA mirrors this strategy with employees to gather real-time insights into staff experience and sentiment. These findings continuously and proactively shape engagement initiatives, benefits, and organizational priorities.

How SCA insights impact every part of the organization:

Test and validate: Understand playlist preferences before going to air, reducing risk of audience misalignment.
Brand tracking: In 2023, SCA modernized its decade-old tracker using Ehrenberg-Bass methodologies, creating a clearer, more accountable brand health scorecard while retaining historical benchmarks.
Longitudinal & ad hoc flexibility : The community enables both long-term audience understanding and rapid on-demand insights; especially during major consumer moments when teams need to adapt quickly.
Insight democratization: A fortnightly “Knowledge Drop” email achieves an 80% open rate and frequent intranet posts ensure insights are widely shared across the organization and top of mind for Sales teams.
Brand lift surveys: Since 2016, SCA has run Brand Lift studies through Alida’s platform. Their new Effectiveness Database—one of the largest global single-network audio advertising effectiveness dataset—aggregates learnings from 550+ surveys, giving partners unmatched transparency into audio effectiveness, benchmarks, and best practices. Updates are shared through trade marketing, LinkedIn, and Insight Breakfast events.
Continuous listening: Regular “PulseCheck” surveys inform People & Culture decisions, recently leading to enhanced benefits, including a 9-day fortnight trial which was directly shaped by employee feedback.

By implementing a research ecosystem powered by listener and employee feedback, SCA has revolutionized the way they access and share data as well as how they make business decisions. This unique, total democratization of customer insights across internal operations and external partnerships is setting a new standard for research innovation.

“At SCA, we are committed to embedding insights into the decisions we make. By leveraging the Alida survey platform, we capture audience, employee and consumer feedback and turn it into actionable strategies that shape our content, campaigns, and partnerships. This award recognises our commitment to ensuring every team has the tools and knowledge to deliver meaningful outcomes for our listeners and clients.”

– Jasmine Beech, Head of Strategic Insights and Effectiveness at Southern Cross Austereo