Writing in The Sunday Age, Michael Lallo makes the following observation, “Last week in Melbourne, the three breakfast programs – Seven’s Sunrise, Nine’s Today and ABC News Breakfast – had a combined average viewership of just 220,000. Breakfast radio shows, in comparison, had more than 920,000 listeners, according to the latest Nielsen survey. So why such a battle over so few viewers? Why the trips to Antarctica, New York, London; the novelty antics of the weather presenters? And how come the hosts are feted like celebrities?”

The answer, according to Lallo is, “Because Kochie, Mel, Karl and Lisa rake in a combined $100 million in advertising revenue.”

But that prompts another question: Why? Why are advertisers prepared to spend so much money on relatively poor rating TV programs compared to Radio which seems to offer so much more bang for their buck?

Of course, any proper analyst would point out that we’re trying to compare apples to cumquats. The audience numbers quoted above are divided by only three outlets for TV and 15 for Radio. And one TVC may have a greater impact than one Radio ad. Then again, a live Radio ad read by Ross Stevenson and John Burns on 3AW may have greater impact still.

To arrive at a different comparison, The Sunday Age commissioned a report from ratings provider OzTAM. “It showed that more than 1 million Melburnians watched at least eight minutes of Sunrise, Today or ABC News Breakfast at least once last week. Still, this was dwarfed by the 3 million who heard at least eight minutes of breakfast radio. Nationally, 4 million Australians watched breakfast TV while 10 million listened to radio.”

Even so, we must take into account that breakfast is Radio’s strongest shift and (apart from mid-dawn) TV’s weakest. Of course that situation inverts at night.

Which suggests that, if Lallo’s Melbourne ad spend figures of $100 million p.a. for just breakfast television are correct, then television is punching way above the weight of its audience in that time slot. In comparison Melbourne Radio managed total ad revenue for all sessions, not just breakfast, of just under $205 million for the entire 2011 calendar year according to Deloitte figures commissioned by CRA.

Now Channel 10 is about to launch its own breakfast TV offering to get a piece of that $100 million pie – or perhaps even make the pie bigger.

Is Radio getting its fair share of the available ad spend?

If not, what does it have to do to get it?