Measurement of Radio/Audio Listening

We help media companies offering Radio and/or audio content to understand and leverage the size, composition and flow of audiences between and amongst different stations and platforms. This data feeds into decisions on how best to maximise audiences with compelling content and how to promote specific programmes to high value listeners. In addition, the data is used for trading advertising inventory between media companies and media agencies buying on behalf of marketers.

Ipsos employs a range of methods to measure radio audiences in more than 30 countries worldwide. These include listening diaries, telephone recall studies and the passive MediaCell Smartphone meter. In each case we ask a representative sample of people to participate in the chosen measurement system. In the case of diaries, people are requested to record in the diaries any radio stations they listen to over a seven-day period. For each quarter hour, they are asked to indicate the stations they are listening to, the platforms used (e.g. a radio station, smartphone or other device) and where they are (home, car, work etc.). Diaries can be in paper form or online, filled in via computers, tablets or smartphones depending on preference.

The telephone Day-After-Recall approach focuses on listening on the previous day, again asking about the stations listened to, the platforms used and the location of listening by quarter hour.

Our Gold Standard MediaCell application detects audio via a special code inserted into the audio stream at source and / or by sampling snippets of audio and matching them to a reference database. In both cases, the source, time and location of exposure can be determined at a very granular level. The combination of these two data streams allows us to capture listening to live and time-shifted audio content on any device, whether via headphones or not, and we can report at the level the market requires, down to the minute by minute level.