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A N DIO
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Actionable Business
Intelligence for Radio
Sponsored by

Media Monitors • Xperi

fotostorm/Getty Images SEPTEMBER 2023
 Future’s 2022 B2B Publication of the Year

September 2023 eBook

Actionable
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3
business
intelligence for
radio

DTS
9
AutoStage
dashboard helps
map success for
RadioAlabama
 “
Actionable Business Intelligence
What Share of Ear
has done is slay
”
mythological dragons
about where the audience is
really going. realize when you look at Share of Ear is that they’re not,” he
4 you know.”
But when it comes to analytics, Resler encourages
broadcasters to gather data themselves as much as
possible — a person’s name, email address and Zip code
are valuable pieces of information. “Ideally, it also includes
behavioral data — for example, did they click on a link to an
article about the Foo Fighters? Do they open emails about
concert announcements?”
Resler has blogged on the value of first-party data; access
that here.
Broad market understanding
Pierre Bouvard, chief insights officer for Cumulus Media
and Westwood One, says any manager will of course start
with the Nielsen Audio ratings to understand the audience
for terrestrial, streaming and podcasting.
“But if you want to know how America is consuming
audio more broadly, there is a syndicated measurement
service that comes out quarterly called ‘Share of Ear.’”
Published by Edison Research, Share of Ear is an audio
listening diary survey that measures all audio that the
radioworld.com | September 2023
respondents listen to during a 24-hour period and reports
on what they’re listening to, how much they listen and
when, where they listen and what devices they use.
“I don’t think there’s a database out there that can do
more to tell you about the state of audio, especially on the
ad-supported platforms,” Bouvard said.
“For many years, our industry thought that our biggest
competitors were Pandora and Spotify; but what you
continued.
“Pandora’s audience is collapsing; it used to be a 12 share
but now it’s a 6 share. And you realize that Spotify is not a
competitor to radio. Their ad-supported service has about a
4 share while radio’s ad-supported share is a 69 share. We
dwarf them.”
What Spotify excels at, he said, is building a subscription
ad-free service, and that audience has exploded. But it’s not
an advertising competitor to commercial radio.
“What Share of Ear has done is slay mythological dragons
about where the audience is really going. It’s not to Spotify.
It’s not to Pandora. It’s to podcasting — and that’s exciting
because we in radio know how to do it. It’s personalities.
It’s spoken word, it’s entertaining conversations. It’s
interviews,” Bouvard said.
But this does mean radio stations need a podcasting
strategy. “When you see that the 25–54 share for
podcasting has gone from a 5 to a 25? Whoa, then
For learning about the behavior of listeners to your own
station, Bouvard has evangelized about the data provided
by Xperi’s new DTS AutoStage hybrid radio platform.
“For many years programmers and sales managers
have been able to do Zip code runs with Nielsen data to
learn where the audience is. That approach uses home Zip
codes, which is useful,” he said.
“But what makes the DTS tool unique is that two-thirds
of American radio listening occurs out of the home —
roaming around town, going to work, doing errands. With
the DTS data, you know where the car is and you know
what people have been listening to. Well, if I’m a retailer
north of town and your station’s audience tends to hang
out on the north side of town, that’s really helpful to know.”
The DTS tool can also help overcome a client’s
misperceptions about your station’s lack of reach into
communities other than your city of license. “In more rural
or local markets, many people buy on perception.” (Read
more about the broadcaster dashboard in DTS AutoStage
on page9.)
What about figuring our who’s listening online?
“For the vast majority of the industry, Triton Digital is the
ad tech company of record for streaming,” Bouvard said.
The company offers a range of services related to digital
and online content, including ad insertion, sales of ads to
national advertisers and audience measurement.
‘They can monitor the streams and look at the hour-by-
 Actionable Business Intelligence

hour pattern. One of the things you learn through Triton is “The most important answer is ‘I don’t know.’ If 50% of
that streaming listenership is 9 to 5, tracking the workday. people don’t know, your salesperson can show that to a
People use the stream while they work, a different pattern client and point out an opportunity,” he said.
than in the car, where we see surges in the morning when “Local retailers often think ‘My competitor is Steve’s
people are driving,” he said. Pest Control,’ not realizing that half of the people in their
“The beauty of this tool is that it’s not based on a sample town can’t name a pest control company at all. That’s a
but on all of the internet connections that were streaming client’s opportunity to get famous. You can do a TOMA
your station.” Even if you’re in a very small market, you can study easily yourself or hire a local community college or
still get data about your station, about who your listeners statistics group.”
are and whether you are attracting some of them from Or for a sense of how your organization’s revenue is
outside your market. pacing or whether your sales team is pricing ads efficiently,
“Triton will tell you that a lot of sports stations attract you might turn to a company like Revenue Analytics that
people who used to live in a market and now are specializes in pricing software and streamlining a station’s
somewhere else but still have an affinity for the local teams sales workflow. Or to understand the state of advertising
and like to listen to the sports talk about their favorite in a local market, you might look at Miller Kaplan’s
team.” A streaming services provider like Triton can also tell revenue reports, which look at top-line market share and
you what percentage of your station audience is listening revenue growth.
on smart speakers or on your app. “Miller Kaplan can tell you the state of advertising in
your local market, based on data coming from you and all
Boosting sales of your competitors,” Bouvard said. “It’ll also tell you your
Many of the analytics tools available in radio focus on the share of the market. It won’t tell you what your competitors’
needs of its salespeople. shares are; but if your revenue is up 5% while the market
One that Bouvard recommends is Scarborough from
Nielsen, which captures national and local consumer
insights across various leisure activities, shopping
behaviors, purchasing patterns and media consumption.
“It can show you in a local market what people buy and
where they shop in that town — for instance, car dealers 5
or furniture dealers in Cincinnati. Most people in radio view
it as a sales tool, but Scarborough also does multimedia
measurement. It measures tuning to cable channels in your
market, local TV station viewership and the use of digital
platforms.”
Hubbard Broadcasting researcher Mike Bustell recently
pointed out that Scarborough data often shows radio
stations beating OTA television in audience, contrary to
longstanding conventional thinking about the power of TV.
Bouvard said, “So you can go into Scarborough and ask,
‘Okay, what’s the reach of TV versus radio? Oh my gosh,
radio beats TV? What about radio versus cable?’ There’s a
lot of insight there.”
He says stations might also consider using “top of mind”
awareness studies that ask consumers in a market to name
the local car dealerships or roofing companies that come to
their mind.

Local retailers often think ‘My competitor is

Steve’s Pest Control,’ not realizing that half
of the people in their town can’t name a pest
control company at all.
radioworld.com | September 2023
 Actionable Business Intelligence
was up 15%, you know someone else is getting that
growth.” Miller Kaplan also offers X-Ray reports that give
insights about individual advertisers or ad categories.
If you want even broader information about your
local market, Bouvard said, the firm Borrell offers
data and insights on how local businesses spend their
marketing budgets.
“It can tell you what businesses are spending on all
forms of media advertising as well as other marketing, and
configure it for any geography down to the county level.
They can tell you how much total advertising is being spent
in your local market, including on Google and Facebook
and online video; and they do this for even the smallest
markets in America.”
Such a tool can be very useful when radio companies find
themselves behaving more and more like mini advertising
agencies.
“A salesperson will come to a retailer and say, ‘I’m not just
here selling radio. Tell me your marketing challenge. I’ll put
together a campaign that might have online video, it might
have connected TV or radio or email.’”
6 McVay also likes a tool called SpotGPS, developed by
You have to know where your audience is,
what they do with their lives and how much
discretionary time they have to listen to what it
is you have to present to them.
radioworld.com | September 2023
Borrell also conducts advertiser agency surveys,
asking advertisers which media do the best job of needs
analysis or of integrated marketing. “They can give radio
a report card of how our salespeople collectively are
doing versus cable or newspaper sellers, for instance,”
Bouvard said.
Competitive insights
Mike McVay, president of consulting firm McVay Media,
notes the dominance of Mediabase, a reporting service that
provides airplay information and insights about consumer
listening trends. It monitors music airplay of approximately
1,800 media outlets in 160 markets.
“It does more than only tracking music. It will show you
where stations are breaking, which gives insight into what
the competition is doing,” he said.
Meanwhile Media Monitors, using broadcast monitoring
technology, lets a user see which commercials are running
and where.
“Click the market, specify a date range, and generate a list
of accounts that ran on the respective stations,” the Media
Monitors website explains. “Generate reports that show
occurrences and expenditure data for each account in near
real-time. … See exact dates and air time, parent company,
category affiliation, pod position and spot duration. Clicking
on the speaker icon will allow you to listen to the spot, and
download it.”
Ralph Cipolla and distributed by Benztown. It uses airplay
data to produce station spot analyses, letting the user
assess and compare any hour, quarter-hour, daypart, day
or multi-day totals and averages, as well as spots, songs or
other on-air events. By confirming placement and quantity
of breaks and sweeps, the company says, the tool helps a
manager adjust and counter-program.
McVay used it in the past while working for Cumulus.
“You could look at an hour and see if your competitor
was playing a better song than you, or if they were in
commercials, or if you were playing a better song than
them. I always felt that was one of our secret weapons.”
New on McVay’s radar is Barometer, a tool that
supports “brand safety and suitability.” The company
promises AI-powered insights to optimize digital audio
advertising.
 Actionable Business Intelligence
“Right now they’re just using it for podcasting,” McVay
said. “But their approach is to go to advertisers and say,
‘Okay, you’re buying bulk, but you may be political-averse
or controversy-averse. This tool looks at a wide field of
podcasts and analyzes if the content of the podcast is a fit
for the advertiser.
“They showed me an example of a podcast that had
the ‘F word’ mentioned 17 times. With this tool, someone
buying through a digital company like Townsquare’s Ignite
would be able to say ‘Don’t buy these specific podcasts.’”
And McVay is impressed by a platform called Spintel
that caters to the music industry. It’s a suite of analytical
and management tools that help users “visualize and
decipher terrestrial radio airplay data” to help find growth
opportunities for records.
“I see applications for it to radio,” McVay said, “because it
aggregates information about songs that are played … not
just on reporting radio stations, but on streaming channels,
satellite syndication and other platforms.”
Focus on first-party
A related topic of note in this discussion is the move
away from third-party cookies that track a user’s browsing
history and activities.
“The digital advertising industry is moving away from
third-party cookies based on changing user expectations
and global regulations,” wrote NAB PILOT in a report earlier
8 this year.
“This could create a $2.1 billion loss in annual digital
revenue for the broadcast industry. Without question,
this is the highest priority for digital leaders at broadcast
companies.”
PILOT, with support from the Google News Initiative,
created an accelerator program focused on direct-to-
consumer strategies to “help broadcasters leverage
audiences that have largely remained anonymous, while
also ensuring privacy protections.” Media companies like
Beasley Media Group, Hubbard Radio, Salem Media Group
and Graham Media Group participated.
The report found that broadcasters should be focused
on assessing, implementing and leveraging first-party data
in light of the loss of third-party data revenue. They also
should be cultivating an ongoing, direct relationship with
viewers, listeners and users.
“In addition to ensuring appropriate privacy protections
and helping to shield against revenue losses, first-party
data is far more reliable and usable than third-party
data,” it states. “The recommendation for those who have
not yet begun this work is to prioritize it immediately.”
The authors also wrote that media companies should
consider “empowering … a cross-functional data analyst
whose sole focus is to create and implement a cohesive,
enterprise-level data strategy.” You can read that report
here in PDF form.
radioworld.com | September 2023
A full quiver
Consultant Mike McVay says tools like the ones we
described above are crucial in today’s media environment.
“The competition is greater today than at any time prior,
and it will only become greater,” he said.
“Radio feels ubiquitous because it’s available on a phone,
on a smart speaker, on a laptop, in your car and over the
air. But it doesn’t mean that we’re only competing with
radio. And it’s not just streaming that radio competes with.
I can pick up Netflix on my phone. I have YouTube, which
gives me everything I want and it gives me the NFL, with
pictures,” McVay said.
“So you have to know where your audience is, what they
do with their lives and how much discretionary time they
have to listen to what it is you have to present to them.”
There are countless more sources of data-rich
information available to radio managers, whether it’s
Media Access Pro from BIA Advisory Services, with its 2,300
fields of data covering 30,000+ broadcast and newspaper
organizations; or Bridge Ratings, which offers on-demand
music streaming data as well as tools like TeenTrends
and Podcastalytics; or Wedel Software and its MediaSales
Analytics tool; or Veritonic and its Brand Lift solution, used
by organizations like NPR to measure the impact of their
client and sponsor audio campaigns.
Seth Resler of Jacobs Media said the tools you choose will
depend in part on the size and needs of your organization.
“A company with 800 stations has different priorities than
one with 17 stations. A large broadcasting company may
be focused on delivering a large audience to advertisers.
Smaller companies may need to be more nimble and focus
on really solving specific problems for a local client, such as
driving foot traffic to a physical location or selling tickets to
a particular event,” he said.
“This is where the first-party data becomes really
important. If a broadcasting company is capturing Zip
codes, it can target people around the physical location.
If a broadcaster knows which listeners in its database
are Foo Fighters fans, it can target them when a Foo
Fighters concert comes to town. In other words, smaller
broadcasters are less about delivering at scale and more
about solving specific problems for local clients. The more
data you have about your listeners, the better you can craft
a solution.
“But at the end of the day,” Resler said, “all broadcasting
companies will benefit from gathering more first-
party data.”
And Mike McVay reminds us that even though radio
people like to gripe about ratings, Nielsen still rules when it
comes to crucial radio data tools.
“The ones who complain about ratings the loudest
are the ones who don’t have any audience,” he said. “I’ve
never had anybody who has great ratings and a big cume
complain to me about Nielsen.”
 Actionable Business Intelligence

DTS AutoStage dashboard helps

map success for RadioAlabama
“I can tell a better story because I’ve got evidence,” says Lee Perryman

D
DTS AutoStage is a hybrid radio platform
from Xperi Corp. that combines linear over-
the-air broadcast with IP-delivered content
and two-way connectivity.
Usage data is free to broadcasters when
they integrate their “now playing / live data,”
streaming URLs and static data like logos and slogans
with Xperi. The Broadcaster Portal provides them with
data about listener engagement with a 24-hour delay.
For example, daypart analytics are available, program
performance data including the most popular format
and content, as are listener “heat maps” that can inform
broadcasters about their audience’s geographical location
in relation to shopping locations and other businesses that
are relevant to broadcasters.
Award-winning broadcast owner RadioAlabama uses the
portal. We talked with its President/CEO Lee Perryman. He
spent 35 years with the Associated Press as head of global
broadcast technology before returning home to Alabama to
start a company that now reaches hundreds of thousands
of people via on-air, online and mobile platforms.
listening and when, because we can show them.
Currently this is available in about 50 models from
car brands such as Hyundai, Kia, Genesis, Mercedes and
Tesla, with more to come in the near future. I believe it’s
representative of listeners who have the most money to
spend; and it’s probably reflective of what the rest of the
market is doing.
What steps did you have to take to start using
the service?
Perryman: We started by signing up for DTS AutoStage and
getting our stations set up. After making sure all stations
are properly attributed in the DTS AutoStage system, we
linked our data flows, and in return we magically see data / Below
analytics flowing in. Lee Perryman
9

Describe your business.

Lee Perryman: I have 11 radio stations operating
under the RadioAlabama brand in east central Alabama.
We are in unrated, unmetered markets. There’s no Nielsen
data to buy even if we wanted to.
We’re in the shadows of Birmingham, Montgomery
and Columbus, Ga., which has been a challenge because
advertisers and agencies that buy based on books ignore
us. They think they can cover us by buying Montgomery,
Columbus and Birmingham. They would ask “Who’s
listening?” and we couldn’t tell them other than showing
our streaming data.
DTS AutoStage has been a game-changer. I can create
a graphical heat map in an instant, showing who’s been
listening and where they’re listening over X number of
days. It shows listening along highways and where they’re
conglomerated in offices; I can show the times of day
they’re listening.
And it’s real data, not something that came out of a fake
diary that somebody was paid $1 to write something down
in, something that may or may not have been true. It’s
factual information that my salespeople can take to clients.
Now they’ve got one leg up in the argument about who’s

radioworld.com | September 2023

 Actionable Business Intelligence

Above And there’s no cost to you. in downtown Montgomery, in the capitol and the
A heat map shows Perryman: Right. government buildings.”
active listenership
to WSGN(FM)
We have a tremendous number of listeners but have
in Sylacauga, When I first saw an early prototype of the never been able to make a dent in that market. Now
a community Broadcaster Portal, it was the heat map that we can show what we always knew but couldn’t prove:
located beyond
the border of
drew my attention. What kind of conversations are There’s listenership there.
the map to the your staff having with clients? We’re about to upgrade that station to a C3, so it’ll be an
northwest. Perryman: We put together one-sheeters about each even bigger factor in that market.
of our stations. Our salespeople can pull one out and
say, “I’ve got a station that is technically not in the Do you drill down to look at listening along a
Montgomery market, it’s 38 or 40 miles north. Nielsen particular road or in a particular suburb?
actually says we’re in Birmingham. But these heat Perryman: Not in terms of targeting advertisers, but we
maps show that there is a preponderance of listening represent to them that there’s momentum along those

radioworld.com | September 2023

 Actionable Business Intelligence
roadways driving traffic to areas where they have stores or
businesses.
We pair Xperi’s analytic data with information from
SecureNet about our streams. We can show that not only
are people listening to the radio but they’re listening to
our streams in that area, which is representative of the
consumption of our content in that market.
Being able to show where and when they’re listening
has been very helpful in opening doors. Before, we were
not taken particularly seriously because we don’t have a
presence in the market.
In certain connected vehicles, if you start your
listenership experience with the radio but leave the over-
the-air coverage area, DTS AutoStage will automatically
switch to the stream for the duration of your journey. So
when we look at the outskirts of our market, we’re seeing
evidence that people were listening on the radio but their
listenership continues outside of our on-air range. The car
took them along with the stream, without them having to
consciously make a decision to switch to the stream.
The listening experience is improved for commuters
outside of our direct on-air area.
In addition to heat maps, the dashboard gives
you analytics about station reach, daypart
Below activity and top charts.
This heat map Perryman: We do take data from those and draw
shows listening
12 to WAUE(FM) in conclusions. But I don’t have dayparts I’m trying to sell.
Auburn, Ala. It’s that magic sexy heat map that’s the key, because you
9000
radioworld.com | September 2023
can visually understand where people are listening. I can
take those 11 heat maps, throw them all on one big map
of Alabama and show where my listenership is occurring
as a group. It makes me look better and bigger, which I
know I am.
Any listener today can get their favorite music
anywhere they want; there’s a preponderance of
choices. My prime mission is making sure advertisers
and prospective advertisers understand that I’m one of
those legitimate choices and that I’ve got people listening
because I’m adding value to the music.
What else should a fellow broadcaster know?
Perryman: A great thing about it, of course, is that
it’s free. And it uses data I’m already producing, the artist
and title metadata that goes out in the streams. It also
helps me support my investment in HD by being able to
have that reporting data showing how my listenership is
split between analog and digital.
I can tell a better story because I’ve got evidence — not
anecdotal, but real evidence of listenership, where it is
occurring and when it is occurring.
There’s no better time to be in the audio business. But
because there are more consumers of audio, we’ve got
to make sure the experience we’re providing is the best
that it can possibly be. It’s not just about playing a record
and hoping it sticks. You’ve got to be able to communicate
with the listeners — and explain that to prospective
advertisers.