One Metric to Rule Them All

My good friend in the audience measurement business, Dr. Ed Cohen, has retired from Cumulus Media following a couple of decades of moving back and forth between Arbitron and Nielsen Media before Nielsen Media simply acquired Arbitron.? Dr. Cohen labors in the hinky space of radio ratings where the mandarins of measurement hold sway and keep the plebes at bay with a fog of acronyms and cryptic equations.

Ed has tried on many occasions to pierce the obfuscation and welcome me into the inner sanctum of listening metrics, but the outreach never sticks.? Unless you are bathed in the relevant jargon on a daily basis or your life or the life of your station depends on it, it’s hard to keep it straight.

Some examples of the miasma of measurement mumbo jumbo include (from the Radio Advertising Bureau’s glossary of terms):

• Average Quarter-Hour Persons (AQH) - The average number of persons listening to a particular station for at least five consecutive minutes during a 15-minute period.
• Average Quarter-Hour Rating - The average Quarter-Hour Persons estimate expressed as a percentage of the population being measured. Formula: AQH Persons divided by the Population x 100 = AQH Rating (%).
• Average Audience (AA) - The average number of impressions per quarter hour within a specified time period (e.g., a daypart) or to a network broadcast as reported in RADAR.
• Average Audience Rating - The estimated average audience during a specified quarter hour or a daypart, expressed as a percentage of the population of the target audience. Usually, carried one place past the decimal point. Formula: Average Audience / Population x 100 = Average Audience Rating (%)
• Average Daily Cume - The estimated average of cumulative audiences for each day of the week (e.g., Monday-Friday). This represents the average number of different persons reached per day.
• Audience Composition - The demographic or socioeconomic profile of a station's audience in terms of composition usually including the percentages of the total audience that fall into each segment. These reports can express audience characteristics by age, gender, ethnicity, working persons, language preference, county, etc.
• Audience Duplication - The amount of one station's cume audience (see Cume Persons) that also listens to another station; also the amount of the audience that is exposed to a commercial on more than one station. Duplication can be expressed either in terms of the actual number of exclusive listeners or as a percentage of the total cume.
• Audience Estimates - Approximations of the number of persons listening to or hearing a network radio commercial, network program or syndicated program. The reliability of audience estimates are not precise mathematical values and are subject to statistical variations and other limitations. For radio networks reported in RADAR, audience estimates represent radio listening as reported by respondents in Nielsen diaries matched with commercial clearances as reported by affiliates in affidavits. For non-RADAR networks and syndicated programs, estimates are based solely on listening as reported in Nielsen diaries and do not take into consideration commercial clearances.
• Audience Turnover - The ratio of a station's cumulative audience (see Cume Persons) compared to the average quarter-hour audience. Turnover equals cume persons divided by AQH persons. In theory, it is the number of times an audience is replaced by new listener within a daypart.

That’s just a taste.? Nielsen's gift to help us better understand and to help Nielsen itself dominate radio audience measurement. And it's all based on some very suspicious consumer self reporting. (There’s more, much more.)

Dr. Cohen keeps his finger on the pulse of these matters and now publishes a weekly blog for Barrett News Media - https://barrettnewsmedia.com/author/ed-cohen/

He recently debunked Nielsen’s latest analytics tool – DDI – Designated Delivery Index.? Suffice it to say, I have no idea what he’s talking about, but apparently it’s a worthless metric that ought to be disregarded.

Make no mistake.? The radio industry is dependent on Nielsen’s ratings – dubious though they may be.? As a station manager, you can’t sell advertising without ratings, and Nielsen can make or break your station.

But Nielsen isn’t the only game in town.? There is a coterie of competing consultants and researchers that each has its own method for skinning the ratings cat.

Among those firms – according to a recent RadioWorld report https://www.radioworld.com/resource-center/ebooks/actionable-business-intelligence-for-radio-a-new-ebook? – are:

Edison Research – Annual “Share of Ear” report

BIA Advisory Services – BIA ADVantage core local market analytics and insights platform offering ad forecasts for 16 media categories from 2020-2027

Triton Digital – the “ad tech company of record for streaming”

Revenue Analytics – ad pricing software tools

Miller Kaplan – revenue reports

Jacobs Media - audience behavior analytics and consulting - annual TechSurvey

Borrell – local ad spending

McVay Media - consultant

Mediabase – airplay information and insights regarding consumer listening trends

Media Monitors – tools for seeing which commercials are running where

Benztown – offers SpotGPS which uses airplay data to product station spot analyses

Spintel – has tools for visualizing and deciphering terrestrial radio airplay data

Bridge Ratings - on-demand music streaming data and tools: TeenTrends

and Podcastalytics

Wedel Software - MediaSales Analytics

Veritonic - Brand Lift

In the midst of all of this measurement of what many are convinced is a dying medium, one might imagine there couldn’t possibly be a new or better way to assess audience engagement.? And one would be wrong.? Wrong about the early forecast of radio’s demise and wrong about the limitations of innovation.

Xperi has performed the equivalent of rolling a live hand grenade into the audience measurement mix.? DTS Autostage, now deployed in millions of Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, and Kia vehicles is poised to see adoption by as many as 10 more car brands globally within months.

Chief DTS Autostage cheerleader,? Joe D’Angelo, senior vice president of global radio and digital audio at Xperi, has been on the stump at trade shows, on podcasts, and in Webinars for the past year talking up the wonders of near real-time listener data gathering.? DTS Autostage has been showing off its listener heat maps (available on a 24-hour lag) and analytics dashboards to demonstrate the power and utility of connected car data.

DTS AutoStage – infused in automobile infotainment systems – has introduced the concept of the hybrid car radio – linking radios to the Internet and relevant meta data for station ID, artist, and track information and, eventually, digital advertising.? It is nothing less than a revolution, and one that D’Angelo described just last week in a RadioInk Webinar.

The implications of the new hybrid radio are important to broadcasters, listeners, and car makers.? For broadcasters – particularly those that have yet to properly embrace the digitization of their operations – DTS AutoStage has essentially turned radio into a visual experience.? Broadcasters are obliged now, more than ever, to up their game and clean up their digital act because car radios represent as much as 50% or more of radio listening. (Time to call Steve Newberry at Quu!)

More importantly for broadcasters, they now have access to listener data that identifies (anonymized) listeners by location, and time of day.? This data can be leveraged with other analytical tools and artificial intelligence to better optimize pricing and promotional plans.? The platform also enables interactive listener engagement.

The platform also presents audience flow data showing how the audience is engaging with radio programming by day-part. Broadcasters also have control and visibility into how their station is performing, operationally within DTS AutoStage cars – for example, is live data available and flowing to the car and how (what broadcast signal) are the audiences tuned to – FM, HD or DAB.

Listeners driving new cars – and older cars that have had their software updated – have seen the sudden shift from awkward and inconsistent in-vehicle integrations of radio to rich, colorful, and Internet-integrated broadcast experiences.? It’s only the beginning – for the stage has been set for advertising and in-vehicle commerce driven by enhanced, interactive broadcast experiences.

Car makers have new resources to render more impressive integrated car radios as well as the ability to observe radio listening by location, length of time, and time of day.? This data is not only interesting from the standpoint of determining the importance and relevance of AM and FM listening to engineers designing infotainment systems, it is essential to the marketing departments of the car makers and their dealers that account for a substantial proportion of radio advertising.

Xperi asserts that DTS AutoStage is already deployed in 5M cars globally, tracks listeners of 94,819 radio stations, has compiled 4B hours of listening data and 20B radio events.

But the DTS AutoStage data may not yet be ready for prime time.? Dr. Rick Ducey, managing director at BIA Advisory Services, notes that a few things will need to happen to properly tap into the value this data represents.

Ducey says the quality of the DTS AutoStage data will be determined by its accuracy, reliability, generalizability, and integration (with other data sources and analytic tools).? Says Ducey:

• Data can be accurate and reliable but if not of sufficient scale, not useful
• Even perfect data, not integrated into data management platforms, data market places, or third party platforms like Strata/FreeWheel, Mediaocian, Marketron, WideOrbit…will be hard to extract value from
• DTS Autostage can have great data in the broadcast portal, but if not APIs or integration to existing platforms and workflows, might be limited

This is where artificial intelligence comes into the picture.? AI is already being employed in ad pricing and placement decisions in the radio broadcast industry, but DTS AutoStage is onboarding an entirely new data set – one that offers the prospect of better understanding what has long been a void in radio audience measurement: in-car listening.

DTS AutoStage has already demonstrated that it is way better than the nothing that has been available up until now.? Broadcasters across the U.S. – and elsewhere (broadcasters throughout Europe are using the data as well as Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada and Mexico – are discovering a new comprehensive (“census” in industry parlance) data gathering tool that shows irrefutably that their station, indeed, has listeners – where sample-based researchers like Nielsen have long suggested they had little or none.

Even more importantly, DTS AutoStage may one day enable “attribution” analytics – tying a particular advertisement, at a particular time, in a particular car, to a particular transaction.? This, of course, would be the equivalent of crack cocaine for radio advertisers, broadcasters, and, yes, auto makers.

It remains to be seen how Xperi’s DTS AutoStage will transform in-vehicle advertising.? The stage has been set for a revolution.? The medium that is still capable of claiming and commanding the broadest audience reach suddenly has a new tool for measuring and engaging with that audience.