Pierre Bouvard, Chief Insights Officer for Cumulus Media\/Westwood One, relayed the experience of a radio manager showing a car dealer a heat map of vehicles tuned to their station and located near the dealership. \u201cYou have listeners literally coming right by my car dealership,\u201d Bouvard recalled the dealer exec as saying. \u201cI should be advertising on your station.\u201d<\/p>\n
Broadcasters have long been able to show the zip codes where their listeners are concentrated, based on their home address. Showing what they listen to while traveling to work, shopping or running errands is altogether new.<\/p>\n
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Mike Hulvey, CEO of the Radio Advertising Bureau, said audience heat maps provide a \u201cproof of concept\u201d for stations in smaller markets. For example, when a prospect asks, \u201cWho listens to your station?\u201d the salesperson can point to a heat map. \u201cHere\u2019s where our listeners are. Every single day it happens to be at your front door,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt makes a difference in the dialog with the advertiser.\u201d<\/p>\n
Heat maps are one of the tools found in the latest version of Xperi\u2019s DTS AutoStage Broadcaster Portal. They reflect listening to broadcast radio in some 14 million cars on the road from 13 auto brands that have integrated the hybrid radio platform. The majority are in the U.S. The portal gives participating stations broadcasting in analog or digital access to unavailable-until-now in-car audience analytics such as listening at the station level by time of day, market, rank and geography in core markets and beyond. These are reported in familiar listening metrics such as audience share, time spent, cume rating and occasions of listening, using sample sizes an average four-times larger than traditional radio measurement firms.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause the AutoStage platform, by definition, is a connected service, we are able to measure user engagement with radio and user exposure to advertising,\u201d explained Joe D\u2019Angelo, Senior VP, Global Radio & Digital Audio, Xperi.<\/p>\n
This data enables radio to prove its heft in ways not previously possible. Broadcasters in resort cities, for example, can demonstrate how their audiences mushroom during peak season due to an influx of tourists.<\/p>\n
A New Tool For Programmers<\/strong><\/p>\n Beyond harnessing the data to grow revenue, the Xperi-sponsored session also explored programming applications. A Cumulus Media station looked at the audience impact of playing a two-hour block of music from one artist leading up to their concert performance. Listening levels went down, not up, Bouvard said. Xperi last year documented an average 40% in-car audience share listening increase<\/a> for all-Yule stations from the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to the Sunday after the holiday.<\/p>\n The system democratizes audience data for markets of all sizes, Bouvard said. \u201cIn radio we\u2019re used to big cities having fancy data, and medium cities getting some data, and small cities getting nothing. Here, everyone gets the same view.\u201d<\/p>\n The biggest shortcoming is the lack of any demographic data. But that\u2019s coming in a future generation of the portal that D\u2019Angelo said could open new ad targeting capabilities and business models for radio. And in the next year or so, Bouvard said it will be possible to demonstrate a radio campaign\u2019s lift by isolating vehicles exposed to a retailer\u2019s ads and identifying which proportion visited the retailer.<\/p>\n