A Fully-Digital Attribution Service Arrives For iHeart

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What is being hailed as “the first fully-digital attribution service for broadcast radio that will transform the way advertisers plan, buy and measure their audio campaigns to better optimize the unparalleled reach of radio” has been launched by the nation’s No. 1 radio broadcasting company.


Introducing iHeartMedia Analytics, which is promising advertiser impact for those who seek digital-like targeting and attribution data.

“By leveraging the data from iHeartRadio’s digital ecosystem, iHeartMedia will enable broadcast radio to measure and show results in the same way as digital media, giving advertisers easy access to state-of-the-art campaign performance insights,” iHeart said in a Thursday announcements.

The potential for advertisers — and for iHeart — is substantial. With digital media soaking up radio and TV ad budgets, the opportunity for iHeart to capitalize through iHeartMedia Analytics could be a game-changer for the radio industry. It could also greatly boost iHeart as it seeks to emerge from Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection.

“These new capabilities will allow advertisers to track audience reach, branding metrics and even sales outcomes for iHeartMedia radio ad campaigns in real-time by using data science to fuse information about its digital audience, with broadcast ad logs, on-air programming and commercial content,” the company notes.

Advertisers will also have the ability to measure a radio campaign’s impact on a brand’s website visitation, social media engagement, and physical foot traffic, iHeart adds.

“We continue to see advertisers spend money on less effective mediums simply because they provide a perceived level of measurability and accountability,” said Brian Kaminsky, President of Revenue Operations and Insights for iHeartMedia. “Now marketers will be able to capitalize on the unmatched scale and reach of iHeartMedia’s more than 270 million monthly broadcast listeners, and receive the same kind of innovative real-time measurements, insights and custom reporting they are accustomed to getting from digital media, quantifying the full power of radio — in addition they can get attribution information that is missing from most of the digital marketplace.”

iHeartMedia Analytics joins marketing optimization tools SoundPoint, a programmatic real-time radio ad buying platform, and iHeart’s recently introduced SmartAudio, which enables advertisers to do impression-based audience planning and dynamic radio ad creative that utilizes real-time triggers — such as weather, pollen counts, sports scores, and mortgage rates — to deploy different campaign messages based on what is happening in a specific market at a specific moment.

“SmartAudio has allowed brands to use broadcast radio ads to dynamically serve the most relevant message in each market, at each moment, just as they do with digital campaigns to ensure increased relevance and impact,” iHeart also notes. “In fact, SmartAudio data-infused impressions now reach more than 3 billion a month, targeting more than 700 audiences programmatically, and will continue to increase in scale as iHeartMedia continues to encompass audiences across all of its assets.”

1 COMMENT

  1. Great to see traditional media formats like radio be included in digital attribution models. This is a big boon for advertisers who have been craving things like A/B testing, day part analysis, and multi-touch attribution as is commonplace in the digital advertising space. We’ve done quite a bit of testing in this area (https://leadsrx.com) and often find radio to be a more cost-effective channel for advertisers, particularly in light of the increasing costs of digital ads, which is being driven by low conversion rates and competitive bidding models. The new capability from iHeartMedia will change the conversation from “does radio work” to “what’s the best strategically for incorporating radio within overall marketing spend”.

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