TORONTO — As a medium known for its engaging on-air personalities who are able to connect with listeners and create an atmosphere of intimacy, the spectre of artificial intelligence being employed by radio stations may worry many.
However, no one should feel threatened that AI is going to take over anyone’s job in the newsroom or sales department at the radio station — instead, AI holds the promise of making some programming jobs easier, while also providing better tools to prove the effectiveness of radio campaigns to advertisers. That was the message from a panel of radio experts at the recent Radio Interactive Summit, held in downtown Toronto last week as part of Canadian Music Week.
The “Putting the AI in Radio” panel discussion was moderated by Paul Cramer, managing director of enterprise radio solutions for California-based Veritone, and featured representatives from three of the company’s customers, including Rogers Radio, Veritone’s first Canadian client. As part of the AI solutions and services it provides to radio and television network clients, Veritone records and indexes broadcasters’ live and archived content, making it searchable and quantifiable, Cramer explained.
“We do that through 185 different cognitive engines, which are currently being used to support more than 1.1 million searches an hour on our platform,” Cramer said. “We enable broadcasters to provide real-time transparency and quantification around both live mentions and also spot-based campaigns, as well as to automate air checks, curate and convert on-air content and turn it into on-demand content.”
Charles Steinhauer, chief operating officer of Westwood One, said his company has streamlined processes and indexed its massive library of audio content using Veritone’s tools. New York-based Westwood One is one of the largest broadcast audio networks in the U.S., reaching 245 million listeners each week across 8,000 affiliated radio stations and media partners. Steinhauer said the use of AI has benefits for both the sales and content sides of the radio business.
“The way radio is moving today is more getting away from the 30 second or 60 second spots and looking at more live reads and integrations. With that comes a very arduous process of proving that the native advertising was read,” Steinhauer said.
“With our sports properties specifically, because there’s tons of integration and tons of sponsorships in the live programming, we have been using AI to basically cull all of that information that used to be done by a bunch of people in production and put it on a platform where our advertisers can come in, actually quantify the amount of live reads in programming, and then actually feel the context in which they were read,” Steinhauer said. “That has helped us tremendously. That process used to be three months at a time to collect all of the integrations we would do in a single football game. Now it’s nearly real-time, and the interface is live for the advertiser.”
“All of this is pointed at such a treasure trove of real audio results, where you never had an audio result to search ever before. Google will give you text (search) results, they’ll give you video results, but they don’t give you any audio,” he explained.
“There’s a bunch of stuff it’s letting us do now at scale, and ultimately will be a real boon for audio and radio and brands.” – Charles Steinhauer, Westwood One
By making audio content searchable and accessible on-demand, broadcasters can insert ads when the content is called down or syndicate the content to a relevant blog site, Steinhauer said. “There’s a bunch of stuff it’s letting us do now at scale, and ultimately will be a real boon for audio and radio and brands.”
Director of programming for KNX News Radio 1070 in Los Angeles, Ken Charles, pointed out that the producers of late night talk shows use AI to compile some of their comedy bits featuring archived video news bites with the help of AI systems. “When you see those first opening bits where Donald Trump said this today, and here’s 40 times he said the opposite in the last two years, they found it through AI,” Charles said.
“Having that tool as a program director, whether it’s news, talk or a morning show, finding that stuff is a huge opportunity. Then the ability to take it and digitize it so now we’re doing a story on our website on whatever the topic is, to not only have the piece of audio today, but to embed the 20 pieces of audio from yesterday is a huge opportunity,” Charles said. “When I’m using my digital tools to drive people to a story, the story comes alive because it’s now not all text, it’s got a ton of audio attached to it.”
Calling AI the “next wave” for news content production, Charles said producers shouldn’t fear these new tools will take their jobs away.
“What it will do is make their job easier, and if they’re any good, they’ll find 20 new ways to take all that audio and integrate it into their content, whether it’s digital, whether it’s on-air or online, and make it a much better experience,” he said. “And that’s just better for us. If the brand is more vibrant, no matter where it lives, we’re going to win.”
Rogers Communications is the first Veritone customer to launch in Canada. Although Veritone has an extensive agreement with iHeartMedia in the US, it does not currently have any agreements with any of the iHeartRadio affiliates in Canada, Cramer told Cartt.ca.
Mike Viner, director of national radio sales for Rogers Communications, said Rogers Radio has been on the Veritone platform for only about a month and its early use of the platform has been focused on native advertising and being able to quantify live mentions that previously were unquantifiable or difficult to quantify, Viner said.
“Radio has produced content for years and that content is vaporized the second it has been produced. Whereas now we have records of the content that we’ve produced, so you can imagine the programming implications of that and the sales implications,” Viner said.
After an early career in radio advertising sales, Viner spent a number of years working in digital sales prior to joining Rogers Radio and he said he believes fundamentally in the power of radio advertising. “I think radio doesn’t have an advertising problem. It has a measurement problem. I think if we had anywhere near the level of analytics that digital has, we’d blow them out of the water,” he explained.
Smart speakers
Another technology expected to be a boon to radio broadcaster are the smart home speakers which have been installed by consumers in droves in the last year. Despite being brought to market by digital audio competitors such as Amazon and Google, they are also being used to listen to AM/FM radio in the home, according to recent research from New Jersey-based Edison Research.
Speaking during a special presentation on smart speakers and voice assistants, Tom Webster, Edison Research’s senior vice-president of strategy and marketing, presented some of the results of a Canadian-specific study conducted via telephone and online survey in November and December of 2017. In its inaugural The Infinite Dial Canada 2018 study, Edison Research found 8% of Canadians reported owning a smart speaker in the home, with Google Home having more brand awareness and installations in Canada than Amazon Alexa.
One statistic that may cause worry among radio broadcasters is that 30% of Canadians report not having a radio in their home. “That means that it’s increasingly difficult to get that signal into the home, except through things like the smartphone, which we know from our research there is not a significant amount of AM/FM content on smartphones, or through smart speakers,” Webster said.
“Think of it as the way people are going to get content… are you ready for that?” – Tom Webster, Edison Research
“I would challenge everyone in this room not to think about the smart speaker as a speaker, not to think about the little cylinder that sits on the counter, but think of it as a voice assistant. Think of it as the way people are going to get content… are you ready for that?” Webster asked.
Edison Research has conducted an ongoing series of research studies with NPR in the US, called Smart Audio Report, that takes a deeper look at smart speaker user behaviours, he added. In its joint research, Edison and NPR found 68% of smart speaker owners in the U.S. said they used the devices to play music, and 38% of respondents said they listened to AM/FM music radio through the devices on a regular basis. In addition, 45% of survey respondents said they listened to news content through their smart speakers. However, only 32% said they listened to AM/FM news talk radio and 22% said they listened to AM/FM sports radio regularly.
Drilling down into time-of-day usage of smart speakers, Edison and NPR found during the morning hours of 5 a.m. to 9 a.m., smart speaker owners said they use their devices to access traffic, weather and news content.
As part of its survey, Edison and NPR asked respondents what activities were being replaced by their smart speaker usage. According to the survey results, 39% of smart speaker owners said the time they spend with their smart speakers is coming from time spent listening to traditional AM/FM radio. “Now of course, you are already on a smart speaker with your stations, so that’s not necessarily cannibalistic,” Webster said.
He ended his presentation on a cautionary note by saying that the industry needs to recognize that many smart speaker owners consider their devices to be home companions as they interact with the speakers’ voice assistants.
“The one word I want to leave you with,” continued Webster, “is when you think about making your own foray onto these platforms, and how you can help connect people who own these devices with the brands and the companies who want to reach them, how you are a natural conduit for that, is ‘trust’.”
