Ad opps abound as online space matures
I was tuning in the shine on my brand-new monitor
Doing anything my hard drive advised
With every one of those dot-com stations
Playing songs bringing tears to my eyes
— with apologies to Elvis Costello
No, it probably wouldn't have been the same if instead of “Radio, Radio” Declan MacManus' alter ego defiantly sang “Laptop, Laptop.” But today that's where many people are listening to music.
Direct talked with Doug Perlson, CEO of streaming-audio ad marketplace TargetSpot Inc., about opportunities for advertisers in the online radio space.
DIRECT: For advertisers, what are the advantages of Internet radio compared with good, old-fashioned terrestrial radio?
PERLSON: There's a few. First of all, there's the ability to have control over targeting. If you want to reach a specific audience as an advertiser on terrestrial radio, you're limited to the geographic scope of a broadcast. You don't definitively know who your listeners are or where they are. With online radio you can target down to the ZIP code because you can identify the IP addresses of listeners as they open up their media players. When a business that's only focused on a few ZIP codes — like a dry cleaner or a pizzeria — advertises on a terrestrial broadcast, it reaches a lot of folks who'll never avail themselves of its services. But if you limit that to specific ZIP codes that are in a five-minute radius or a five-minute walk, your campaign can be more efficient.
DIRECT: What other ways can you target who's listening?
PERLSON: You can frequency tap and only pay for the listeners you actually know are listening to your broadcast. With terrestrial you're relying on a sample. When your ad is third or fourth in the commercial break, you may or may not have lost some listeners — you don't really know. With online radio you have actual real-time reporting that tells you [exactly] how many people have heard your ad, when they heard it, and what station they heard it on.
DIRECT: How do online radio advertisers determine ROI?
PERLSON: It depends. There are brand advertisers who're doing sampling and measuring how the brand resonated with a listener. Then there's clearly the ROI-driven advertiser who will have a unique URL. Every audio ad also has a tethered, clickable visual ad in the media player. When listeners hear the audio ad there's often a call to action that asks them to click on, say, the McDonald's logo to win tickets to the Wiggles or whatever it may be. That's the key — to have a real-time call to action and [prompt] people to take action immediately after they've heard that ad. And because so many online radio listeners are sitting on their computers, often at work, they're a captive audience that can transact immediately. Advertisers can direct their links anywhere they want. Promo codes in the audio ads often are used to track conversion that way. Online radio is such that you're probably only going to get about a third of the actual visitors to your site through the URL you've provided in that clickthrough. One-third will come in through direct navigation — if there's an ad for McDonald's, they'll just go to McDonalds.com. The other third, especially with advertisers that have a less-defined brand, will navigate to the site through a search engine. If you only track the clickthroughs on the media player, you'll miss about two-thirds of the visitors. We're alpha testing a conversion tracker that'll allow advertisers to drop a cookie on the listener to see how effective the overall ad campaign was.
DIRECT: Is there a lot of inventory?
PERLSON: There is. Online radio has been exploding over the last few years, and it's not just streaming terrestrial stations. It's everything from AOL Radio to Yahoo Music to music social networks like Last.fm, Project Playlist and TheBlast.fm.
DIRECT: Who's the typical listener?
PERLSON: It's all over the board; there are similarities. In some of the broader research we've seen, generally speaking there's a daytime, at-work, white-collar listener. Some stations skew older, some younger, some more male, some more female.
