“AM/FM radio’s ‘big data’ moment has arrived.”
That’s the pitch from Lauren Vetrano of Cumulus Media, commenting on the company’s adoption of the Xperi DTS AutoStage system as an important new source of audience behavior information.
We’ve reported on the Cumulus decision to subscribe to Xperi’s paid tier of analytics. Now Vetrano — vice president of Advertiser Measurement & Insights for Cumulus Media and Westwood One Audio Active Group — has put up a blog post laying out the reasons and calling on other radio companies to make sure their stations are sending out metadata.
Vetrano noted that the DTS AutoStage platform is now reporting in-car AM/FM audiences in 300+ U.S. markets from 6 million vehicles, including ratings from the previous day. She provided a slide showing the growth in the number of cars:
“AM/FM radio now has modern, cutting-edge, timely measurement, which does not rely on a consumer’s memory or require a consumer to do something (like wear a gizmo),” Vetrano wrote, taking a dig at Nielsen’s PPM.
Cumulus and Nielsen are in the middle of a legal fight over access to Nielsen’s national data.
Vetrano urged other radio stations to provide “now playing” metadata from their playout systems to make sure they show up in Xperi’s DTS AutoStage audience rankings.
“A recent example is from Buffalo, N.Y., where two Townsquare stations typically generate a 20% combined share of listening,” she wrote.
“Before they started providing DTS their ‘now playing’ metadata, each Townsquare station only had a 0.5 share in DTS. Once the ‘now playing’ metadata started flowing to DTS, the two stations’ shares soared to a combined 25 share.”
She emphasized that DTS AutoStage shows all station audiences, whether they subscribe or not.
“Over the last several years, large amounts of AM/FM radio listening has gone missing due to Nielsen Audio’s new ‘pay for play’ policy. By only reporting audiences from stations that ‘pay to play,’ upwards of 10%, 20% and even 40% of listening shares are missing.”
Nielsen declined comment for this story.
Cumulus released a 14-minute video summarizing its arguments; it’s given by Pierre Bouvard. Watch it below.
