Ryan Steelberg is the president of Veritone. Our interview with him originally appeared in the free Radio World eBook “AI Comes to Radio.”
Radio World: What is Veritone’s AI offering in radio?
Ryan Steelberg: Veritone’s suite of AI-powered services and applications enable both local radio stations and networks to significantly accelerate their workflows, save costs and deliver incremental value to their advertising customers.
Veritone turns media streams into indexed and searchable data in near real-time. With Veritone Discovery, users can easily search for keywords such as brand names or talent, perform fast ad verification, analyze content and leverage custom reports and dashboards.
Veritone Attribute gives broadcasters the ability to correlate ads (including prerecorded, live and in-program executions) with the advertiser’s website traffic. This award-winning application arms sales teams with comprehensive performance insights to share with their ad clients and help them optimize campaigns, nurture client relationships, and ultimately secure more share of ad spend.
RW: What prompted you to explore this?
Steelberg: If there’s one industry that can take advantage of the power of AI, it’s media and entertainment. Considering the large amounts of data broadcasters and content owners have to manage on a daily basis, AI is a critical component to success — it not only reduces costs and time but also opens up opportunities for incremental revenue generation as well as product innovation.
Our AI-enabled technologies put linear media on a more level playing field with digital media, giving broadcasters the analytics, transparency, efficiency and immediacy they need to help their advertising customers measure media ROI and as a result, maintain share of wallet against digital alternatives.
RW: Does any of this constitute a first for the industry?
Steelberg: At Veritone, we unify substantial domain knowledge from previous successful companies and technologies (AdForce, 2CAN Media, dMarc, Google) with in-depth AI technology expertise and vision, all of which position us uniquely in the marketplace and give us competitive advantage — we are the first AI-native company in this industry.
Today, we are ingesting, indexing and analyzing over 60,000 hours of unique audio and video content each day. The scale of this processing, for audio and video, is a first in any industry.
RW: What do you allow radio professionals to do that they couldn’t before?
Steelberg: Two things: One, Veritone radio customers can validate placements in near real-time, expediting the clearance process faster than ever before. Second, our radio customers are now able to compete with digital advertising alternatives by definitive attribution of e-commerce or other website transactions correlated to radio ad placements. To validate placements, sales teams can search on-air content within minutes of the broadcast and perform on-demand or automated searches to track any advertising message, whether live-read or prerecorded, through a simple user interface.
RW: Who are some of Veritone’s radio customers using AI?
Steelberg: iHeart, Learfield IMG College, Cox Media Group, Entercom, Cumulus Media, Beasley Media Group, Bell Media, CMG Radio.
RW: Where do you think AI for radio is going next?
Steelberg: We believe that AI is already changing the game for radio today, and broadcasters who embrace AI technologies will reap tremendous opportunities and competitive advantage. However, we are convinced that this is just the start for an industry that will reinvent itself. We are excited to be part of this development and to help those who are ready to embark on this journey.
We just announced aiWARE’s expanded content classification capabilities, powering contextual ad placements and brand safety management at scale for podcasting. And also, our VeriAds program, which is helping broadcasters to liquidate unsold ad inventory and drive incremental revenue, is growing rapidly in the radio space.
