Asset Management

Radio broadcasters can use artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze and enhance the effectiveness of broadcast advertising to boost customer investment, according to Veritone. “We now live in an age where data and analytics influence everything,” Ashley Bailey, product marketing manager for media and entertainment at Veritone, said Feb. 13 during a webinar called “Broadcasters: Does Radio Advertising Work?”


Agreeing with that, Michael Kennedy, director of product management for media and entertainment at Veritone, said: “In today’s informational era, this claim is really an ode to Darwinism, where data insights offer survival in today’s extremely competitive landscape. Your competitors are using data and so should you. Otherwise, you’re definitely at a clear disadvantage.”

It’s also important to note that “data isn’t just quantitative; it’s also qualitative,” he said, explaining: “It’s all the ways you go about managing performance, tracking progress and gauging success – and that isn’t always done with hard numbers.”

Data should also “be used to drive decision-making on all levels, in order to help you chart the course of success and optimize, we think, at the very least,” he said.

Organizations that use data and analytics to help steer strategy tend to retain more of their current advertising clients, increase ad spend, and continue to add new clients, according to Veritone.

After all, “without data, it really is a guessing game,” Bailey told listeners, adding that without data, “advertisers will ask ‘how do you know if my ad campaign is effective?’ and it’s extremely difficult and nearly impossible – or at least it used to be – to articulate the impact and begin to measure correlations.”

But, with Veritone Attribute, broadcasters “now have a way to effectively measure online response to on-air advertising campaigns, and that will allow them to “climb out of the abyss and connect elements of your non-digital radio broadcasts to digital and use real data to advise your advertising clients throughout their campaigns on how to best use their ad dollars and, in turn, accelerate purchases,” she said.

She pointed to a comment that she said David Field, CEO of Entercom Communications, made at the 2018 Radio Show in Orlando, Fla.: “Radio doesn’t have an effectiveness issue. We have an attribution issue.”
That’s true, Kennedy said, telling listeners: “Bridging the online-to-online chasm that so many broadcasters and advertisers face is a real obstacle. Trying to measure something that is an evergreen like terrestrial broadcasts, which inherently lacks digital elements and correlate it to online activity isn’t an easy feat. But, admittedly, there’s intelligent ways to go about measuring that and stringing together various data points that help bind this information together. Veritone Attribute is able to bridge this chasm by using technology to create data points from commercials or in-program advertising and organic utterances and pair it with Web analytics.”

These same issues impact other mediums also, including TV, “but we’ll save that for a future discussion,” said Bailey, who joined Veritone in the fall, following the company’s purchase of Wazee Digital.