MEDIA & MARKETING: Eamon Dunphy and Sam Smyth's replacements will find it difficult to prevent a loss of listeners
"PAGE NOT found," reads the error message on the web page where the archive for the Dunphy Showused to sit. But Newstalk's website is not completely devoid of references to its star ex-presenter. It still boasts a 19-month-old press release on Eamon Dunphy's return to the station, with Newstalk chief executive Frank Cronin hailing his arrival to the Sunday schedule with the conviction that "now more than ever we need his brand of rigorous questioning".
Whatever the reasons for Dunphy’s explosive departure – pay, principle, restlessness, or a combination thereof – Newstalk will have to do without his brand of rigorous questioning from now on. With the axing of Sam Smyth from Today FM, it is now all change on Sunday mornings at the two national stations owned by Denis O’Brien’s Communicorp.
Though Cronin describes Dunphy’s listenership figure of 58,000 as “relatively poor”, the history of radio audience trends suggests that whoever takes his seat will find it difficult to prevent a slab of Dunphy loyalists from slinking off into the morning.
“Listenership figure history has shown that when you lose a high-profile presenter, it’s very hard to maintain that audience,” says Aidan Greene, managing director of agency MediaVest.
Initial curiosity on the part of the audience fades to indifference – but it’s not always personal. “Audiences who were loyal to the former presenter take the chance to change their behaviour.”
While some listeners rejig their presets, others switch off altogether, denting the overall listenership for that time slot.
This market-shrinking phenomenon means that any voluntary tinkering with the high-profile parts of the schedule is risky. On this basis, departing Today FM chief executive Willie O’Reilly’s stated motivation for dispensing with Smyth’s services – an annual listenership decline from 106,000 to 92,000 – would seem a strange commercial decision at best.
“Losing strong personalities in radio is always bad because, let’s be honest, that’s what pulls in the listeners,” says Bill Kinlay, chief executive of media agency Mindshare Ireland.
The Sunday-morning slot – both Dunphy and Smyth’s shows kicked off at 11am – performs a particular function as a review of the week, he points out. “It’s important at that time to have a strong schedule.”
Strong personalities, by definition, don’t enjoy being told how to run their own shows. Dunphy’s allegation that he was discouraged from inviting economist Constantin Gurdgiev on to his show was followed by his assertion that he wouldn’t indulge in the “happy-clappy stuff”. But “good news” is often in the eye of the beholder: what Gurdgiev labels “fake positivity” could fall within Cronin’s definition of “positive recovery stories” that merit airtime.
In any case, there is no clear evidence that audiences – and by extension advertisers – actually want less “negativity”. On television, the broadcaster with the most impressive viewer surge since the crisis began is the never knowingly “happy-clappy” Vincent Browne, who now pulls in 200,000 to 250,000 to what was thought to be a graveyard slot.
“The consensus among our clients is that news programmes, particularly news radio, has done much better since the recession,” says Greene.
“Once universal social charges started kicking in, people found more relevance in the news and advertisers found that there was a more attentive audience. Newstalk has done very well out of that.”
Early-morning exposure to “doom-and-gloom” headlines does, in theory, put audiences in a bad mood. “Anecdotally you hear that people are tuning out. But there’s no evidence of that in the listenership,” says Greene.
For his part, Greene does not believe “that a memo went round” Newstalk, telling presenters to “put a positive spin” on the news.
“There’s no ways guys like George Hook or Damien Kiberd would accept some mandate from Denis O’Brien to be positive. The one thing Newstalk has got right is that it has strong presenters – trying to put a muzzle on them won’t work.”
How much sunshine there is in the new Sunday-morning radio landscape may not become clear until the new year. Smyth’s final show airs this weekend, with PR consultant Anton Savage pencilled in as the new presenter.
Ivan Yates, Newstalk’s breakfast-show host, will take the Dunphy slot this Sunday and next. But Newstalk has yet to begin its trawl for a permanent replacement.
Cronin says the headhunt is likely to extend beyond its existing roster, quickly adding that the station is “a very attractive place to work”, lest anyone might have seen Dunphy-quoting headlines to the contrary.
“We’re growing very fast and we expect our shows to keep growing. We’re very ambitious,” he says on listenership.
“Maybe there is a logic to it and there’s some master plan,” concedes Kinlay. “The most important thing for advertisers is to know that they have a plan; that they have someone in mind.”
For listeners who cannot get on with either Savage or Dunphy’s replacement, the “natural choice”, as Kinlay puts it, is RTÉ Radio 1, where the most recent Joint National Listenership Research figures show Marian Finucane has 335,000 listeners on Sundays.
This is down 30,000 on last year, meaning she could do with a little audience boost as a result of the Today FM/Newstalk kerfuffle. Frustratingly, it could be six months before advertisers can establish exactly how listeners have reacted.
“It will be interesting to see who’s sitting here in the future,” Dunphy pondered in the closing seconds of his final show. But notwithstanding Newstalk’s view that its presenters should avoid “contributing to the overall feeling of desolation and despair”, advertisers are too busy looking at listenership figures to care how glum the mood is in the studio.
“When audiences were consistently good and growing across the board, advertisers could choose a particular tone of programme that they wanted to advertise with,” says Greene. “Now they’re just chasing an audience.”
