TORONTO — With a little more prep time, the radio executive superpanel at Canadian Music Week’s annual Radio Interactive Summit may have turned into a drinking game, if moderator Sharon Taylor’s last-minute idea to offer panellists a choice between answering questions or downing a shot had come to fruition…
As it was, discussion among the radio execs was free flowing during Thursday afternoon’s panel, with topics ranging from the impact of smart speakers and voice assistants in the home, to audio streaming, to some of the business challenges related to audience measurement and big data.
Despite ad revenue continuing to diminish for terrestrial radio as more and more music listeners turn their ears elsewhere, Canada’s top radio executives insist radio is a great business to be in. Troy Reeb, senior vice-president of news and radio station operations for Corus Entertainment, pointed to Stingray Digital Group’s proposed $506-million acquisition of Newcap Radio’s owner, Newfoundland Capital Corporation, as evidence the radio industry remains strong.
“Newcap found out this week that somebody still thought this is a really great business to be in, with the big investment made there. But it has to be one where we have the capacity to be able to compete with all the new players coming in, and we can’t do it with one hand tied behind our backs,” Reeb said.
“We have a challenge in this country, and that’s a regulatory one. Unlike the U.S., where there’s not the same limit on the number of stations and number of streams that one provider can have in a single market, in this country you’re still limited to two AMs and two FMs in a market. And yet, we compete against Spotify, which will run an infinite number, thousands of stations, coming from Sweden,” Reeb said.
With growing popularity of in-home smart speakers, such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, moderator Sharon Taylor, president of Toronto-based Sharon Taylor Radio, asked the panellists if they thought smart speakers are a means of getting regular radio listening back into the home. According to Taylor, smart speaker ownership went from 11% to 21% in one year, with sports listeners leading in usage.
“Just when we thought the only hill we could own is in-car, I think the smart speakers now allow us a great vehicle back into the home.” – Rob Farina, Bell Media Radio
Rob Farina, head of radio content, strategy and iHeartRadio, for Bell Media Radio, said the more consumers get into the habit of using smart speakers, the more radio listening in the home is going to occur. “Just when we thought the only hill we could own is in-car, I think the smart speakers now allow us a great vehicle back into the home,” he said.
“But we have a lot of work to do on our side to make that possible. We have to work closely with the Google folks and the Amazon folks on making sure the integrations are right, making sure that we’re clear on the commands, and also making sure that, and I speak on behalf of iHeartRadio, we’re the default platform people are accessing these signals from,” Farina added.
Caroline Beasley, CEO of Florida-based Beasley Media Group, which owns and operates 63 radio stations in large and mid-sized markets across the U.S., said her company rolled out its smart speaker initiative last year and now sees 12% of its streaming traffic coming from these home speaker devices.
“Amazon sold over 20 million of these in the last two years. We are integrated on there, and we are about to be integrated on Google,” added Mark Redmond, president and CEO of SiriusXM Canada.
“Remember, we own the content and those smart speakers, they need content. They’re happy to work with us, but you have to be aggressive in going out and making sure you build the skills and you get on their platforms,” said Julie Adam, senior vice-president of Rogers Radio.
“When people are calling up through a search engine or choosing a specific streaming provider, they’re making a conscious choice to have things routed, not through a public transmitter, but through a channel where someone else is going to latch on and grab the data value from it, and potentially grab the advertising returns on it as well. So, they are frenemies, not just friends.” – Troy Reeb, Corus Radio
Reeb added radio broadcasters need to be mindful of the fact that Google, Amazon and Apple are looking to drive their own advertising business through these smart speaker devices. “The big problem now is there is nothing agnostic about the way that content is accessed any more. When people are calling up through a search engine or choosing a specific streaming provider, they’re making a conscious choice to have things routed, not through a public transmitter, but through a channel where someone else is going to latch on and grab the data value from it, and potentially grab the advertising returns on it as well. So, they are frenemies, not just friends,” Reeb said.
Measurement and privacy
Generally speaking, Adam said, streaming now accounts for about 15% of Rogers Radio listening traffic, across multiple platforms, whether that’s online, mobile or smart speakers. She added going to an all-digital radio format would provide benefits in terms of better audience measurement and being able to better serve advertisers, too. “If, and I say this with a big if, we were able to convert all of our terrestrial listening to digital, and use that data, we’d be in a better place. We’d be in a better place for audience measurement, and we’d be in a better place for the advertisers, because you can slice that data, you can target it, you can run ads for certain demographics or by location. It’s a real advantage to be able to have that data,” Adam said.
“With streaming, we know the number of starts, stops. We know when they’re punching in, when they’re punching out. We could look at all those patterns. In terms of the analytics, that’s just scratching the surface,” added Farina. “For programmers, I think they should be looking at their streaming data. A lot of programmers drive themselves crazy with their PPM dailies, which will just drive you nuts. To me, streaming, I feel like it’s a real-world, unvarnished, irrefutable reflection of what’s going on,” Farina said.
As a subscription-based streaming service, SiriusXM Canada is able to use its subscriber data to better market content to its users, Redmond said. “If I know you’re listening to E Street Radio, I know you’re a Springsteen fan, so I can start to market relevant Springsteen content. If we’re doing a town hall session with him, we can target you on something like that. It becomes more of a one-to-one marketing than it is a mass marketing, and in our case, that’s absolutely critical,” Redmond said.
As radio broadcasting moves from a one-tower-to-many format to more of an interactive experience for listeners, Taylor asked the panellists about the challenges created by the growing concern among consumers regarding privacy and the feeling of being spied on by their new smart home devices. “I think that’s a real concern, especially as we’re heading to digital ad insertion on the digital platforms so we can send more targeted ads,” said Farina.
“The onus is on us as broadcasters to make sure that we’re responsible with how we’re treating our listeners’ data, we’re transparent with our consumers on how that data’s being used,” Farina said. “I think anybody that’s had a smart speaker has had the experience of, you’re having a conversation with somebody in the room, all of a sudden the smart speaker comes out and says, ‘Pardon?’ It’s like, who the hell was that? Right? It’s scary.”
One of the ongoing challenges for radio broadcasters is the sheer amount of listener data garnered from a variety of sources, such as Nielsen (and Numeris in Canada), websites and mobile platforms, and being able to monetize that, Beasley said.
“We can show our advertiser how much listening data we do have, but then how do you close that connection? How do you go to the advertiser and say we ran this campaign and it was effective, how do you show that?” Beasley asked. New tools that capture click data on advertisers’ websites can provide proof that radio campaigns work, she added.
Speaking about some of the challenges related to traditional daily PPM audience measurement, Adam said Rogers Radio has found itself in a situation where it couldn’t measure audience this year in a handful of its smaller markets, because it couldn’t get a return on the sample, she said.
“Any time you’re going to look at data sliced and diced the way daily PPM is, and break out a demographic, it’s going to be very difficult to say that’s reliable. I think when you look at PPM trends over a long period of time — big sample, big trends — they line up with what we see in research and what we see through our streams. But it’s not ‘How did we do yesterday?’, it’s ‘What’s the big trend over the last year?’ PPM is so expensive for us that we can’t justify putting it in smaller markets,” Adam said.
Reeb added: “We’re at a difficult point in the evolution of audience-based data, and that is we’ve sort of gone over the cliff as is evidenced by the fact we can’t get a sample in some small to medium markets any more. But we haven’t climbed up the other side yet, in terms of the amount of not only readily available data that’s coming out of new systems like streaming — or in the TV world, set-top boxes — but it’s not only not quite available and easy to process enough, but it’s also not believable enough to the ad agencies.
They’re looking at it right now like it’s our proprietary data we’re showing to them… The one thing that the Numeris system has, or Nielsen’s, is equal representation from advertisers and broadcasters. But it will get fixed I’m confident in the next couple of years.”
