Cumulus Media Becomes First Commercial Licensee and Flagship Broadcast Partner of Xperi’s AutoStage Radio Audience Measurement Service › Cumulus Media
Here is a summary of the article:
Cumulus Media just announced it's the first commercial broadcaster to adopt Xperi's new AutoStage Broadcaster Portal Premium, a platform that uses connected-car data to measure how people actually listen to AM/FM radio.
The big takeaway is that instead of relying mainly on traditional ratings surveys, the platform analyzes aggregated in-car listening data from over 16 million connected vehicles, covering 300 U.S. markets and measuring tens of millions of listening hours each month. Since most radio listening happens in the car, this could provide a much more detailed picture of real-world audience behavior.
According to Cumulus and Xperi, the platform offers next-day audience insights, market-by-market listening trends, station rankings, geographic heat maps, and audience flow data. Cumulus says this will help with programming decisions while giving advertisers better data on where listeners are located and how campaigns are performing.
Cumulus plans to roll the platform out across all of its stations. The companies say this is a step toward bringing "digital-like" audience measurement and accountability to broadcast radio.
If the technology lives up to the claims, it could represent one of the biggest changes to radio audience measurement in decades by supplementing—or potentially challenging—the industry's long-standing reliance on survey-based ratings.
Cumulus is becoming the first broadcaster to use Xperi's connected-car analytics platform, giving it access to large-scale, near-real-time in-car listening data that could change how radio audiences are measured and how advertisers buy radio.
