Branding at ABC Radio

A little look back at how the ABC has marketed its local radio stations over the years.

I have been thinking a lot about broadcast radio lately. I am an enthusiastic ABC radio listener and have always been so. But the sands are moving. Fast.

My favourite station is ABC Radio Melbourne; official call-sign 3LO. The station is approaching its 100th birthday this year, and for most of its history it was known on-air as 3LO. Following a sudden and very controversial re-branding in 2000, it was renamed “774 ABC Melbourne”. At the time, the name change didn’t go down well and it’s amusing that almost a quarter of a century later, people are still talking about it.

In 2017, it became “ABC Radio Melbourne” without reference to the AM frequency, which is probably appriate in these times of digital streaming and DAB+. Lately there’s been a reversal of sorts, and the station is now being referred-to as “774 ABC Radio Melbourne” which is really quite a mouthful. Otherwise it’s just “774” which makes no sense whatsoever for the DAB+ and streaming audience. 3LO really was much easier.

3LO was once one of Melbourne’s leading radio stations (and the most popular ABC station anywhere in the country), but its ratings have plummeted in recent times, moreso than its commerical rivals. There seems to be an identity crisis within the ABC, which had lead to a sequence of rebrands in recent years. But this is not new.

For this blog post, I thought I’d go back in time to look at how the ABC marketed its offerings in the past. Back in the day, local ABC stations were given a lot of leeway. In a branding sense, Melbourne’s 3LO would look and sound a lot different to, for example, Sydney’s 2BL or Adelaide’s 5AN.

In the mid-1980s, this started to change and a more unified corporate branding was rolled-out across the ABC. In 1987, the “blue square” logos were introduced across the country for all capital-city and regional stations. This included the stations that would eventually become Radio National, such as 3AR Melbourne.

But things started to get messy, in a graphical sence, when some regional stations moved across to the FM band, which meant that their callsigns changed and space became tight.

By the mid-1990’s, many regional stations had moved across to the FM band and some had dispensed with the use of official callsigns altogether, such as 3MIL which was known on-air as “Oasis FM” (now ABC Mildura Swan Hill). New pictorial logos emerged for many of these stations, although the prize for the most divergent branding was Perth’s 6WF (now ABC Radio Perth).

This branding was scrapped in 2000 when the ABC local radio stations were ordered to cease using their callsigns on-air and rebrand.

Now the ABC is using a round red disk logo for all of their radio stations, which lack any reference to frequency.

So here we are…. over a generation we’ve moved from blue squares to red disks! Does any of it matter? Probably not. But as the ABC contemplates its place in a world where fewer and fewer people are tuning into analogue radio, branding matters.

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