While digital audio accounts for roughly 16% of time spent with digital media, it attracts less than 3% of total digital ad revenue, according to a recent report.
And so the Interactive Advertising Bureau Media Center has published the second installment in its guide series on digital audio measurement. “Amplifying Audio’s Impact in MMM: A Follow-up to the Beginner’s Guide,” examines why audio struggles to capture advertising spend despite what IAB believes is strong consumer engagement.
IAB’s “Getting Audio and Podcasting on the Media Plan” working group concluded that the primary cause is audio’s underrepresentation in media mix models, which advertisers rely on to allocate budgets by correlating marketing inputs with sales outcomes.
One takeaway specific to radio was that models were undercounting ad success because they were grading when ads were scheduled to run versus what actually aired. As-run data, through timestamped logs, could more cleanly align sales bumps with actual broadcasts.
“When too little campaign detail reaches the model, it returns a small or uncertain number, which looks the same as a bad result to the person deciding where the budget goes,” the report said.
The guide argues that audio does not suffer from an effectiveness problem, but rather a data granularity problem.
Takeaways
IAB Media Center conducted interviews with media agencies, audio publishers, tech platforms and former brand analytics executives.
The guide highlights three takeaways for media planners:
- Data loss across channels: Independent benchmarks place digital audio in the upper half of marketing channel returns, yet it captures less than 3% of digital revenue. The guide traces how campaign data is lost across eight data handoffs between buying and measurement systems.
- The importance of as-run data: Modeling based solely on planned media schedules hurts performance. Citing an industry study, the report said that replacing planned local radio schedules with verified as-run data across three live models raised measured radio return by 27 percentage points, reaching 78%.
- Segmenting four distinct audio platforms: Rather than placing all audio into a single bucket, the guide calls for media mix models to measure four separate audio channels: broadcast radio, streaming audio, podcasting and satellite radio.
The report also outlines standardized data fields and provides recommendations for advertisers, agencies, publishers and measurement vendors.
Better data can help the industry move beyond a single audio number to understand what worked, where it worked and where future investment can have the greatest impact, IAB said.
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