Radio and the ‘Monetizing Data’ Ad Opportunity.

INSIDERADIO
March 6, 2016

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Broadcast radio’s digital revenue is expected to increase 14% this year, and digital ad dollars could account for 6.5% of total station revenue, according to a recent report from Borrell Associates and the RAB. In contrast, the traditional ad market is flat, or growing low-single digits.

At the same time, radio’s competitors are prevailing in the local digital ad race. Newspapers derive one-quarter of their ad revenue from local digital sales, compared to an average 10.6% for TV stations and 5.5% for radio stations, according to Borrell’s “2015 Local Digital Benchmarking” survey. Large-market newspapers averaged $12.3 million in digital revenue, compared to the average large-market radio cluster earning $2.61 million in digital sales last year. A small-market newspaper booked $1.43 million in digital sales, while a small-market radio cluster took in $275,295.

To increase revenue, radio needs to monetize their data, execs and analysts agree. “Radio has proven its ability to drive Internet traffic and the opportunities to target advertising are tremendous,” says Gordon Borrell. “Data tends to be a scary word. It seems like a technical task where you need a computer science degree, but it is a marketing term.”

For now, stations are dabbling in applying data to advertising campaigns. Greater Media is looking for ways to use data for internal efforts, such as promotions and programming, and is exploring using it with clients. In Philadelphia, for example, at rock station WMMR (93.3), afternoon host Jaxon is a huge Jeep fan, and the station started a Jeep-centric Facebook group, Jaxon’s Jeep Club. The group has grown to 1,500 members and the station has hosted multiple events for the group. By accessing data on the group members, WMMR connected some clients—including local Jeep dealers, aftermarket Jeep parts suppliers and a Halloween haunted house where they held a meeting—to the niche audience. “It is an example of what we want to do more of: Find passionate, niche groups in our audience and connect them with opportunities,” says Greater Media’s director of Digital Operations, Steve Meyers. Taking data management a step further, Borrell says radio sales reps can even help clients build their own databases, such as scanning business cards a local business collects in fish bowls, and combining that with station data to hyper-target marketing. Such database marketing can have an immediate impact on a station’s digital sales.

Podcast Consumption Surges to One in Five Americans.

INSIDE RADIO Updated 27 min ago

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Monthly listening to podcasts crossed the 20% threshold over the past year, according to the first findings released from Edison Research's Infinite Dial 2016 study, conducted in partnership with Triton Digital. The percent of the U.S. population that says they listened to a podcast in the past month increased from 17% in 2015 to 21% this year, for a monthly podcast audience estimated at 57 million.

“That increase is some of the largest growth for the medium that we have observed in more than a decade of our podcast research, and represents an estimated 57 million Americans,” Edison VP of strategy & marketing Tom Webster says.

Inside Story: Data Now Lets Radio Target More Precisely for Clients. Imagine being able to know essential, even quantifiable details about your audience—from age and zip code to car buying and travel plans—enough so that you could marry that with ad campaigns. After years of selling based on demographics, radio stations can put a face—and more—to digital users and, possibly, their broadcast audience too.

Web analytics allow stations to track users accessing live streams, mobile apps, social media and station websites, and that intelligence stands to transform radio’s business. Broadcasters looking to grow digital and keep on-air ad sales steady are now ready and better able to monetize their treasure trove of data.

Users constantly leave behind reams of personal information, both voluntarily via forms and sign-ups and unknowingly by the breadth of their digital footprints. Until recently, radio stations have largely used data to fine-tune internal operations such as programming and promotions. But that same data can work for their clients, who are eager to reach precise audiences with minimal waste. Using both sophisticated modeling and common sense, radio stations are beginning to apply that digital behavior to on-air listeners. “We are at the point of how do we ask really intelligent business questions to get value out of that data,” says Greater Media’s director of Digital Operations, Steve Meyers. Long in the business of selling reach and frequency, radio stations can use data to identify detailed audience targets and propose tailored campaigns to reach niche audiences and psychographics. “You can buy smarter,” says Radha Subramanyam, iHeartMedia’s president of Insights, Research and Data Analytics. As more advertisers budget greater amounts of digital media, traditional broadcasters are scrambling to compete, and data can help those efforts. “Local radio and TV have been hurt by that shift of dollars,” says Kevin Gallagher, executive VP, local director of ad agency Starcom. “In broadcasting, we can get better on targeting and move to more behavior-based buying. Data can get us there.”