Page 35 - Adnews Magazine January 2022

“That includes providing greater insight into the role that different audio platforms play in a consumer’s life, working with agencies to ensure their existing planning models and tools accurately reflect the scale of opportunity available, and making the purchase of digital audio automated, uniform and easy.”
CRA made significant steps last year to improve audio measurement. In September, the industry body revealed that GfK’s radio ratings system would move away from relying solely on paper diaries and adopt a hybrid meth- odology. The new Radio360 system will use data from an electronic watch meter and use ediaries. Livestreaming data will also be integrated into the new system, which will begin to roll out in stages, to provide further details on the size and profile of audiences listening across digital platforms.
In the podcasting space, CRA also made changes to the Australian Podcast Ranker, which is verified and reported by Triton Digital, to include listener and download figures for the first time. Previously, the ranker only provided a ranking of the shows according to total downloads.
Craig Cooper, chief investment officer at Carat, says the updates to the Podcast Ranker are crucial to the future growth of the medium.
“Podcasting has certainly been a hot topic this year, and with the ratings boost during the past 18 months there’s very good reason,” Cooper says.
“It was especially fantastic to see the CRA release the actual podcast ranker audience numbers; a great first step in becoming more transparent also shows the confidence in the depth of the platform.
“Transparency and audience verification, within any channel, is an important factor for both agencies and clients and it is paramount that the audio industry strive for gold standard delivery here.”
However, ARN’s Lauren Joyce expects measurement to continue to be a big topic across the audio industry this year.
“As advertisers invest more in digital formats but seek to maintain the returns they yield from radio, they will demand ‘rolled up’ reporting, consistent trading language, and standardised metrics,” Joyce says.
Above, from left: Lauren Joyce, Bart Pawlak, Corey Layton
“The unregulated nature of the digital audio industry and funda- mentally different trading approaches across radio, and dig- ital formats makes satisfying these demands quite difficult.”
Cooper says digital platforms in audio remain an area of growth, with better data playing a key role in unlocking that growth.
“Audience data in the digital audio space is the biggest barrier for growth and it has been difficult to obtain this universally, that is inde- pendently verified,” Cooper says.
“This is something that we would encourage the CRA and broadcasters to continue to work collectively on so that digital audio can be a ‘must have’ on media plans and is future proofed.”
Another challenge for the audio sector is getting the creative right. According to the IAB’s ‘2021 State of the Nation’, a third of media agencies aren’t tailoring creative to suit different audio environments when running cam- paigns across different broadcast and digital audio advertising options. This statistic hasn’t
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