day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the HTN 2020 1 Past Year Results. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.
I'd now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Mr. Kieran Davies, CEO and Managing Director. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining today's call. We've had a really positive start to the year despite the uncertainty of the broader environment, and we are very well positioned as we pursue our agenda for further growth. Revenue has recovered strongly, finished the half up 21% on a like basis at £110,000,000 driven by a good agency market. EBITDA was £30,000,000 EBIT was up 139 percent to £24,000,000 and NPAT grew to £14,500,000 As flagged in February, the Board was committed to rein saving dividends. And today, the directors have declared a fully franked dividend of $0.035 a share.
Our balance sheet strengthened further with net cash of $122,000,000 and provides optionality as we explore the right opportunities to grow scale, creating multi platform content and building data capabilities in what we believe will be a consolidated market. We are investing to grow our core radio broadcast radio and digital audio business in the areas of content, distribution and new technologies. In May, we announced the signing of a non binding term sheet to sell 100 percent of Soprano to Link Mobility, and I am pleased to say the process is progressing well with the binding SSA expected to be executed shortly. The terms value Soprano at approximately $560,000,000 with HD and E stake at 140 $1,000,000 Link's trading update to the market yesterday was encouraging, and we're excited to see these two businesses come together, creating one of the world's leading CPaaS providers, while giving an opportunity for further value creation to HG and E shareholders. LINK shares will be held in escrow for a period of 6 months following completion of the sale, after which HG and E is permitted to dispose of the shares on an off market block trade or sell down over a period of time.
Operationally, the advertising markets in Australia and Hong Kong strengthened, and we are particularly pleased with the progress ARN continues to make. Despite lockdowns, reduced commutes, new forms of audio growing in popularity, radio remains a very relevant and resilient medium, growing in listenership, up 2% on this time last year. Increasingly, we are seeing our content migrate to live streaming on digital platforms, making it more accessible, extending our reach and potentially offering new commercial opportunities. ARN remains the number one metropolitan radio network, thanks to some outstanding performances. And having launched just over a year ago, our podcast offering is also the clear number one publisher in the market.
We are winning commercial share and our digital revenue growth is gathering pace and ahead of expectations. Finally, this is a tough time for our staff as we navigate lockdowns and work from home, while at the same time as a business, we are making the cultural transition to become a digitally enabled company. I'm very proud of the whole team contribution at this time, and I'm committed to continuing investments that prioritize employee health and well-being and supporting our people so they can be 100% focused on achieving their goals. Andy?
Thanks, Kieran. Good morning, everyone. We've kept the format of the financial results consistent with the recent past with reconciliations to assist in understanding exceptional items and the impact of lease accounting included in the appendices. For clarity, references to on a like basis throughout the presentation refer to the removal of disposed businesses from the comparative. The impacts of JobKeeper payments received under the initial scheme have been excluded from our underlying results, and the comparative cost base includes the financial benefit of temporary cost control measures taken in early 2020.
On Slide 4, we've shown the half year reported results. Results for the half were significantly improved on 2020 with revenues up 21% on a like basis, driven by increased consumer confidence delivering a return of ad spend across both our markets of operation. Costs were up 12% on a like basis impacted by higher cost of sales, continued investment in digital audio capability delivering revenue growth and the reinstatement of marketing and certain discretionary costs. Resulting underlying EBITDA improved 55% to 30.4 percent. Included within exceptional items is an increase of $4,000,000 for provisions relating to previously disclosed historical tax matters.
Looking at the consolidated results of ARN for the period, radio revenues were up 19%, broadly in line with market, noting ARN has delivered significant share gains across the previous 2 financial years. On a like basis, digital audio revenues grew 149% propelled by podcasting and streaming growth. Total costs rose 13% on a like basis. Higher cost of sales were recorded on improved total revenues and an increasing contribution from digital audio at lower margin under our current podcast content model. People costs were up 5% impacted by ongoing investment in digital capability and the reinstatement of FY 2020 temporary cost savings.
Operating costs finished 13% up also by the reinstatement of FY 2020 cost savings, in particular marketing, travel and entertainment expenditure needed to execute our strategy in an improving advertising market. Pleasingly, resulting EBITDA saw a significant improvement, up 57% on a like basis. On the next slide, we've included additional detail around our radio and digital operations with revenue, costs and earnings of each split out. We anticipate providing this detail in future reporting periods to highlight the earnings contribution and quality metrics of the radio business, whilst demonstrating our approach to investment in digital audio. Broadcast radio fundamentals remain robust with a sustained focus on controllable costs over a number of years contributing to a healthy EBITDA margin.
Cost of sales grew on significantly higher revenues whilst the reinstatement of FY 2020 temporary cost savings contributed to remainder of the cost increase noted in the period. For clarity, total people and operating costs, effectively our controllable costs, remained below 19 levels in the first half. Turning to Digital Audio. Revenue growth accelerated in the period with our commercial team now consistently writing revenues in excess of $1,000,000 per month. We continue to secure significant benefits from our long term partnership with Iheartmedia, including providing listeners exclusive access to some of the best content, an expansive technology roadmap and relationships across key functions enabling fast learning.
Encouragingly, the volume and value of podcast campaigns is increasing month on month with regular listening to podcasts forecast to the past 37% of the population this year. We believe the podcast advertising market is nearing an inflection point. Consequently, in H2, we'll be investing further in ARN original content and scaling our digital commercial team. Turning to slide 7. Performance of Cody Outdoor improved substantially in the period with fewer lockdowns and a well progressed vaccination program driving renewed advertiser confidence and a 28% improvement in revenue on a local currency basis.
Total costs rose 15% with higher cost of sales on improved revenues, while the remaining cost base was held largely unchanged from the prior period. The business returned to positive EBIT, aided by improved revenues and also a reduction in depreciation attributable to advertising concession leases following impairments taken in June 2020. Our focus remains on returning CODI to positive cash flows on a consistent monthly basis and with increasing consumer confidence and improving business trajectory into the second half, this is looking more likely as we move into Q4. The next slide shows the balance sheet at June with a strong net cash position of over $122,000,000 The deposit of tax and dispute line continues to be where we account for balances associated with the branch dispute, comprising the $51,000,000 deposit, offset by a $30,500,000 provision and $18,400,000 of interest deductions. Briefly, in respect of the ATO matter, unfortunately there has been no significant progress in the past 6 months.
We continue to await the decision from the ATO regarding our objections to their amended assessment covering the 2,009 to 'fifteen period. We remain confident of our position and are prepared to pursue the matter fully through to litigation. Other significant balance sheet movements include the rebuild of net working capital in line with improved revenues, a reclass of our investments of Prana with a held for sale asset, 3.5000000 tax provision for a previously disclosed historical loan forgiveness matter and the reduction in right of use assets and lease liabilities reflecting the passage of time on remaining advertising contracts in in CODI.
Cash flows for the period are outlined on Slide 9.
The business recorded positive operating cash flows after lease payments of $14,500,000 up twenty 6% in the period. The operating cash flow result was impacted by improved earnings, up 55% and offset by non cash share of associates of $4,000,000 attributable to Soprano and the Perth JV. There were a number of material items impacting the prior year comparative, which we've called out, including our investment in Omedia, which we still maintain, working capital benefit on reduced revenues and a dividend payment in respect of 2019 paid in March 2020. I'll now pass back to Kieran to take you through the rest of the presentation. Thanks, Andy.
And turning the presentation.
Thanks, Andy. And turning to operations on Slide 11.
Commercial radio has never been stronger, growing and reaching 11,000,000 listeners a week with live and local content delivered by well known personalities. ARN is dominating delivered by well known personalities. ARN is dominating again in 2021, has now had 13 consecutive surveys as the number one network and reaching over 5,000,000 listeners a week. We've made gains across the country, but I'm particularly pleased to see the progress we're making in the key Sydney and Melbourne markets. Kyle and Jackie O's popularity is enduring and long lasting, and they achieved another significant milestone in this half, taking the number one overall breakfast show, AN and FM, for the first time in their history.
They've had 20 consecutive surveys as number 1, building close connections to listeners with the unique ability to influence and engage as demonstrated by the reaction to Kyle's Get Back Baby video. This trusted real authentic relationship between on air talent and audiences is a really engaging environment for advertisers to utilize. Also, we're very pleased with the growing strength of Christian O'Connell in Melbourne. Christian has changed Melbourne radio, is very commercially friendly and has enjoyed 9 surveys as number 1, with Gold the number 1 station for 12 radio streaming is seeing considerable growth, up 19 percent to 2,400,000 listeners on average streaming each week. This tells us that fans will find a way to listen to content they want with streaming on mobile up 5%, tablets and PCs up 20% and smart speakers up 51 percent.
ARN live streamed nearly 8,000,000 total listening hours a month across all platforms with smart speakers now accounting for 35% of this figure, strong growth over the past year. This scale will only build as we continue to focus on live stream distribution, the key benefit of which will be radio offering increased targeting capability. Podcast listening is also growing strongly, offering a unique opportunity for advertisers to extend their audio with 284,000,000 podcasts downloaded in Australia this year. 37% of Australians now listen to podcasts every month, that's up 53%. Launched at the start of 2020, ARN is the number 1 podcast publisher in the country with 5 of the top 10 podcasts downloaded and as the table shows 15,000,000 downloads in July.
New digital audio formats like podcasting are not a threat to radio's long term future. It's now widely accepted that radio, music and podcasts are complementary, expanding audio consumption. And in fact, this additional time spent with audio is coming from other mediums, not radio. The commercial opportunity for ARN is that advertisers are lagging behind this listening behavior. And our job is to unlock ways of commercializing this content.
How do we do this? By continuing to create content that grows scale of audience, by making it easier to buy, by providing measurement, insight, attribution and targeting that gives confidence to advertisers. And we're going to continue to make investments to unlock this opportunity, which includes increasing sales headcount to target digital revenues. Particularly pleasing in our drive to create the best audio experience for audiences and the most comprehensive solutions for advertisers is the progress we are making with Iheartradio. We launched Iheartradio 7 years ago in Australia, well ahead of the market and we're pleased to offer the most complete destination for digital audio in the country, offering what 86% of people desire, their favorite content in a centralized and easy to navigate location.
In other words, radio, music and podcasts all in one place. We've exceeded over 1,000,000 unique users a month and top 2,000,000 registered users, a growth of 53 percent. But more importantly, Iheartradio distributes content everywhere our audiences choose to listen across 2,000 devices from smart speakers to wearables to gaming consoles. Our exclusive partnership with Iheartmedia in the U. S.
Delivers great benefits. Having this global scale and intellect at our disposal, we and our advertising partners have the ability to continually enhance the scale of customer experience with improved features and functionality, have access to advanced tools and leverage key technology integration learnings. Meaning we can fast track our Australian content and platform strategies with confidence, generating greater scale, engagement and quality first party data. Data. I won't spend a lot of time on this slide now, but in our core business, the strategy is to build the best in class broadcast radio and digital audio business, investing to grow audiences, offering multi platform content, distributed at scale and increasingly backed by digitally enabled solutions.
We're focused on 3 key pillars for long term growth: content, distribution and commercialization and partnerships. In content, our network of super brands caters for all the key age demos, is backed by the best Australian talent and complemented by a unique and compelling podcast library. We distribute this content at scale. We have a leading radio and DAB plus network in metropolitan markets, the number one podcast publisher and have the most established full stack audio distribution channel in Iheartradio, providing radio, music and podcasts all in one place. And we continue to roll out new innovative and increasingly digitally focused solutions for advertisers that are winning share and allowing us to develop mutually beneficial partnerships with local and global brands like New York Times, TikTok and MTV to name a few.
Just before I move on to the trading update, a quick look at how the radio advertising market is performing during COVID lockdowns. The total market for the half grew 20%, up 54% in Q2. We've seen a 2 tier recovery so far with the agency market up 28%. SMEs, which accounts for about 25% of of total revenue, is slower to return as you would expect. But in markets less affected by lockdowns, we have seen direct advertisers starting to return, giving us confidence that this sector will bounce back from lockdowns end.
Key categories continue to spend on radio with 4 of the top 5 in growth over 2020. And in relation to cancellation, as you can see from the graph on the bottom right of this slide, we have not seen the level of cancellations we saw in April May last year despite the prolonged lockdown in Melbourne late last year and the current lockdowns we experienced. Advertiser sentiment remains positive to year end with briefing activity high, although uncertainty exists as we grapple with extended lockdowns in key markets. Moving to the trading update at ARN. In July, AR revenues grew 19% on the prior comparative period.
August has seen a slight easing of bookings, but pace length suggests a similar result for the month. Extended lockdowns, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, may impact FY 2021 performance, mainly due to some uncertainty of the SME sector. However, forward bookings for the remainder of the year are currently tracking well ahead of this time last year, with briefing activity remaining positive. Recent digital performance has continued into Q3, with average monthly revenues for the quarter pacing to finish in excess of 1,000,000 dollars a month. Investments in the launch of a new breakfast show in Melbourne, the implementation of original podcast creation, increased digital commercial capability and the relaunch of the Edge will see total people and operating costs for FY 2021 now expected to $2,000,000 to $3,000,000 above FY 2019 levels.
At CODI, improved mobility levels, low infection rates and the strong vaccination program are driving consumer confidence and a return of advertising spend in Hong Kong. Trading conditions continue to improve in July, with revenues finishing up 56% on the prior comparative period. Should current COVID settings be maintained, forward bookings suggest a continuation of this trend for the remainder of Q3. Thank you for your time, and I'll now open the floor for any questions you
may have. Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. We have multiple questions in queue. Our first question comes from the line of Tom Beadle from UBS.
Tom, please ask your question.
Hi, guys. Thanks for the opportunity to ask questions. I just had 3, please. Just firstly, just around the radio ad market. It's obviously still below pre COVID levels.
But can you talk about the types of categories that are holding back the market just because of the current round of lockdowns? And what proportion of your advertisers from, say, 18 to 24 months ago aren't advertising simply because their businesses are shut at the moment? And on the flip side, can you also talk about the categories that are spending more? And to what extent you think they're holding up the market? Just the second question is just on your radio OpEx guidance.
There's obviously a revenue growth assumption in there to get to that guidance. But so can you talk about just maybe the moving parts and the people and operating costs in the second half, please? And then finally, just a question around Google and Facebook. Southern Cross obviously announced yesterday that they have a provisional agreement with Google. Are you in negotiations with Google or Facebook?
And could you provide any color? Thanks.
Thanks, Tom. I'll take 1 and 3 of that and maybe Andy could cover part 2. The radio ad market is not quite back to 2019 levels yet, and that's primarily driven by the SME market, which we called out there in the presentation. That accounts for about 25%. Now that's back maybe 10%, 20% on bottom margin 2019 levels.
We're starting to see a return come through in markets like Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, which have been less affected. In terms of the overall percentage of businesses, I'll just stop there. I don't have that to hand. But what I am seeing though is a new form of advertiser coming through. All of those SMEs, which have shifted business models to become much more digitally focused and online transactionally focused, they're still using radio because they know that radio drives big conversion for driving people to digital.
So my concern is that the SME market is not going to return when normality comes back. No, I'm not, because there are new categories of advertisers coming through. There's new business models coming through. And those that have spent in the past know the power of radio and what it does for the business in terms of delivering ROI. In terms of categories, I pulled out on slide and I think it was slide 16, just the advertising markets.
We've given the SMI categories there that are back in growth, driven primarily by retail, government, auto dealers and insurance to some extent. Categories that are not spending would be the likes of, say, automotive brands and who are to do generally do large brand building pieces, but they're not spending at the moment. They're back a bit. And obviously, the sectors of hospitality and events, festivals, those sort of things are not. Again, we start to see that come back a little bit in March, April of this year.
But with current uncertainty and some cancellations of festivals, that they will come back at some stage, but probably not this year. What I am encouraged about though from a radio industry perspective is that all radio operators have really started to align together in terms of promoting the power of radio, which is a new development and something that we're all very positive about. Commercial Radio Australia was just hired a commercial director. And her job is to reinforce the strength of radio, make radio easy to understand, improve metrics that we have in the market and really drive increased share of advertising into the radio market. I think it's really important to point out that, that radio listening continues to grow.
The effectiveness of radio is still very strong amongst advertisers. People are not listening to less radio because of new audio opportunities. And we see an opportunity not just in growing we growing the radio market, but also growing into the digital audio market, which we are starting to target digital revenues, not radio revenues. And I'll do number 3 and then Andy could do number 2. In terms of Google and Facebook, part of the mandate that CRA are working on for the moment is as an industry, we're going to be working closely together to work with Google and Facebook.
And we are working closely with CRA to make sure that happens. So we're not engaging individually with them or doing it as an industry.
Andy? Thanks, Kieran. I'll take the costs. So, Tom, in response to your question on radio OpEx, so cost in the second half as an absolute compared to the first half will be higher. That's predominantly due to marketing phasing.
So the launch of KISS 101 on Melbourne Breakfast Show, which is in the second half, will contribute to higher marketing costs, plus the current activity you see on screens for WSFM and KISS. People costs within the radio business will remain relatively steady into the second half. So that's radio. In respect of digital, costs will increase in the second half as communicated through the trading update. That's going to be covering commercial capability as we see the opportunity in front of us and original content creation for podcasts.
I hope that assists.
But Tom, I think it's also important just to back that one up is that we've broken out the radio revenues and P and L and the digital P and L. Our radio margins and business is extremely stable and very, very profitable. We see a big opportunity in the coming years in digital audio growth. I think with the strength of our balance sheet, the strength of our broadcasting radio business, we are really confident of what the future could hold. But it does mean that we have to start investing in capability to build our digital audio content creation and monetization.
So that's really the area of focus of investment for us over the coming 12, 18 months.
That's great. Thanks, guys.
Our next telephone question comes from the line of Entcho Raykovski from Credit Suisse. Entcho, please ask your question.
Good morning, Kieran. Good morning, Andy. So my first question is around ARN. Interested in what's happening to your average unit rates. The last result, you spoke about rates being down about 10%.
Obviously, we're in a different market at the time. Just interested in whether the recovery in the market has benefited rates significantly? Or are you perhaps seeing a slightly slower recovery? Maybe if you can answer that and I've got a couple of others.
Sure. In terms of the rate performance, we're not back to 2019 levels yet, but we have seen rate improvements come through this year, particularly on stations like Gold in Melbourne, where we're obviously growing an audience base quite substantially and consistently holding it. So our target is to get back to 2019 levels. We are in growth. We're not quite back there yet.
But I certainly see it, subject to the certain uncertainty of lockdowns, which will end, we are very focused on making sure we return to 2019 levels from an AUR perspective. Not quite there yet, but getting close.
Okay. Got you. Probably the other point to note is the market was radio market was back 25% last year and our average unit rates, as you say, sort of dropped 10% or just under 10%. So we were able to hold rates pretty well across last year.
Okay. Thank you. And then your writings, as you say, as you find out throughout the presentation, have been very strong. Interesting your thoughts on whether you would have expected to do better against the market given those very strong ratings? I mean, are you concerned that you haven't had higher growth?
Or is that an opportunity in future periods?
Not concerned at all and always want more share, but certainly not disappointed with share that we're getting. I think it's a combination of consistent ratings, but also a consistent commercial strategy to market that that's really influencing how our share growth over that period of time. You may have a great audience, but that doesn't necessarily always translate into winning share because if you're not meeting advertiser requirements, if you're not doing good integration, if you're not hitting the strategy that the clients want, then your audience can be as big as you want, but they still won't advertise. So what we're very pleased about is consistency of ratings and you can go up and down in 1 book or 2 books, we know that. But it's the consistency of ratings and it's also our commercial strategy to market that's actually winning the share for us.
I think where we still see opportunity is in Melbourne on Kids 1 and 1.1, where we have a new breakfast show launched. We're quite excited by what that can do. And if we can generate the level of growth that we've seen through our introduction of Christian in
Are you satisfied with the talent you've got having been locked in? Or is there some risk for cost to go high to next year?
We're very satisfied with talents that we have. You may remember that towards the end of 2019, we locked all our key talent into multiyear contracts. So not expecting much cost increase going into 'twenty two from that perspective, maybe a bit of CPI, but not concerned about talent leaving and the cost impact has been well recorded, so not concerned there.
Good morning, gentlemen. Actually, my question was the one about the ratings and the relationship to revenue, which is pretty comprehensively. So thanks for that.
Our next telephone question comes from the line of John Campbell from Jefferies.
Great result. Well done. Congratulations. And just two questions from me. One is, are you different whether listeners access IRN content via traditional means or via Iheartradio?
Are you is it completely indifferent in terms of how you view it?
No, it's not indifferent. It's not critical. I think what we're seeing at the moment though is that with COVID, people the concern, I think, that advertising that maybe the market had when COVID first came out was that people were not going to be in cars, and therefore, consumption of radio was going to decline quite materially. That probably led to the level of cancellations we saw in April, May last year. Actually, what we've seen, which we inherently knew ourselves, was that people will listen to our content in whatever platform they can.
And increasingly, we're seeing that platform being in a digital environment, be it smart speakers, be it tablets, be it desktops or PCs. And what is really encouraging for us is the growth of live listening on those digital platforms. And we would continue to encourage listeners to listen on digital platforms as much as we can because it is a commercial benefit down the road, not at the moment, but down the road when we have a scale of audience that's listening to live content on digital platforms because it offers great commercial opportunities for things like targeting and maybe breakout advertising, but that's not something that we're looking at, at the moment. So it's not sort of live and die by, but it's very encouraging because I think it's building a business model for us down the road.
Okay. So potentially, if a large number of listeners access via other digital means rather than just accessing traditional linear radio, That could be negative in the short term. Is that what you're suggesting?
No, not at all. Because overall, radio listening is going up. So our product is still being consumed. It's just being consumed on many different platforms. So and it's still recorded in the audience measurement.
So absolutely, this is a very positive thing for the industry.
Yes. Okay. Okay. The second question is you've sort of already touched on this, I think, a bit with a couple of the earlier questions. But and you certainly touched on the talent part.
But in terms of your overall operating costs within IRN, beyond FY 'twenty one, you've sort of alluded that there's technology investments and there's you're making some more marketing investments in FY 'twenty in H2. But do you broadly see the cost base effectively back to normal this year and we're really just talking about normal ordinary course of business cost increases going forward? Like there's no step change in technology costs required or potentially marketing costs. That's the question.
Hey, John. I'll answer that one. No, we don't. Look, 2021 is effectively reinstating our 2019 cost base. We've been a lean, really well run business for a number of years.
So we don't have a huge amount of cost base to play with. So 2021 is a reinstatement of 2019. There we don't see any significant step changes within the radio business and the call out that we've made in the trading update are tied to our digital audio revenues, which you can see are growing fairly materially. So we've got a very tight alignment between cost changes and revenue growth.
Yes, great. Just one last question while I've got you Andy, if you don't mind. In the balance sheet asset held for resale of $22,000,000 what are we referring to there?
Apologies if that wasn't clear enough. That is our stake in Soprano.
Okay. So
as Kirill mentioned, the process is going. And so we've moved that from where it was to that categorization.
Got it. Thanks for that.
Our next telephone question comes from the line of Eric Choi from Darren and Joey. Please ask question, Eric.
Good day, guys. Thanks for the questions. And a good chat, Andrew, on the cancellations as well. It's really useful. First one, just wondering if you can give us a sense of what's happening with audiences during lockdowns.
Just thinking about breakfast and drive being such a big component, it's a pretty cracking job that you've done so far just to sort of hold everything up. So just wondering what's happening with the audiences. 2nd question, just outside of Sydney, are we sort of punching ahead of that 20% growth in July August? It sounds like at an aggregate level, we're sort of back to close to FY 2019. And I wonder if you excluded Sydney, would you be sort of back to those FY 2019 levels already in other geographies?
And then just last question, I'm
just trying to get a sense of maybe the longer term SME upside. I know you guys in the industry were sort of pushing some initiatives to drive greater SME sort of awareness and uptake prior to the lockdown. So I don't know if there's any stats in terms of, I don't know, listening share versus share of wallet, etcetera, that you can give us on the SME to give us a sense of where that can move to medium to long term? Thanks.
Thanks, Eric. Just in terms of audiences, what we've very much seen, and again, this is thanks to sort of the shift to more digital listening, is that the power of our talent on breakfast and drive particularly is still a motivating factor for people to listen to live and local radio. It's content that connects. It's a sense of normality for people. It's a sense of live and trusted content from personalities that they know well.
What we've seen though is that people are still listening at the normal times of breakfast, if you like, with a little bit of catch up radio happening. And then in digital environments, they're actually keeping the radio on longer. So actually, through COVID, we've seen radio increase in terms of listening because the radio is staying on longer. And we obviously have many different platforms. In terms of the geographies, for the essence, for advertising, I think if you look at the agency market, 1st of all, it's not really a geography related situation in that it knows a lot of time it depends where agencies are situated.
And we've a lot of agencies in Melbourne who are spending. So I don't think to sort of look at a market like Melbourne and Sydney in isolation to others is really reflective of what's happening because very often clients buy 2, 3, 4, 5 markets in combination on their buy. I think definitely, I don't have stats for you in terms of what you're looking for SME. But if I look at briefing activity for the SME market and I look at the sort of the sales reports coming through from the direct teams each week, the level of interest and the level of intent spend is still as strong as ever, if not continuing to grow. It's just a question probably of confidence of visibility of when lockdowns will end.
Got it. Very helpful. Now I was just looking at the CRA data, which kind of shows like Sydney was only up 11% in July and the other geographies seem to be up much further than that, but makes sense. Thanks very much guys.
Thanks, Harry.
There are no more further questions at this time. I would now like to hand the conference back to today's presenters. Please go ahead.
Well, thanks everybody for your time. I hope that was good enough detail for you. Look forward to speaking to you all over the next few days. Thanks for your time.
Thank you all for joining today. You may all disconnect. Have a great day and goodbye.