Would You Give Away Your Over the Air Audience

During a recent interview for the “Being More Than Radio” a 3 part series for Radio Ink, I had a  discussion with Jan Muller, CEO of Audiospace. They’re the app company doing business globally in both the radio and retail space. Muller is also the CEO of newly purchased My 105 FM in Zurich, Switzerland. Given that the discussions swirling in the conference rooms of North American broadcasters sometimes includes looking to Europe for alternative ideas in revenue generation, we take a closer look at My 105FM.

Muller has an avant-garde approach to selling commercial time on his station in that they giveaway the Over The Air (OTA) audience and charge for the digital impressions that come from their stream. Jan said “We believe we are the first radio station in Switzerland which only sells 100% accurate, measurable campaigns. That means we only sell digital. We use traditional distribution as an add-on. Admittedly this would be very hard for an established radio station which has an existing good business to convert to something as unique as what we’re doing here.” Regardless, he encourages it as a way for new format flips and new station purchasers to consider.

“We believe that today this is the right way to do radio. We have a low cost base. An expensive infrastructure is not needed for radio in the time in which we are living, and that lowers your cost.” He said “ We look at each radio station as if it is a platform. You do not necessarily need to produce all of your content in-house. You can have talent that are not in your market, but are connected to your community. It’s about connection.”

It’s difficult to imagine that in North America anyone could ever convince broadcasters to charge only for their digital audience and deliver the OTA audience without cost. Muller’s reasoning is from the perspective of the advertiser. “The audience you build is one which should be accurately measurable, and that means your audience is online. Online, you can be 100% accurate as to how many people, how many users, and listeners are receiving a message from your radio brand.” His perspective is one that digital sellers use to their advantage, and radio broadcasters sell against.

The difference between how we “do radio” versus how they do it may be cultural; it could be technical in that European broadcasters are not uniform in how they deliver content, and it could also be that they’re onto something worth considering. My 105 sells advertising at a CPM of $40. Jan’s example is that “you pay around $40 to reach 1,000 people. And as we can only guarantee an accurate measurement on this by being online, we only sell the online audience. On top, and for free, you get all the rest.”

He acknowledges that his station has a higher CPM than others, and said “we only sell what we can measure. That is the thousands of touchpoints our brand has. And when it comes to our over the air audience, It's an add-on you get for free.” It comes back to the way that digital is sold, and that Muller believes the low sample size used by rating services (acknowledged as estimates) is inferior to the more accurate impressions of digital media.

Further clarification from Jan “Because we price advertising based on our digital audience, we can send reports to the advertisers (clients), which are accurate. We can report a listen-through rate. That is we can provide the advertiser with a percent of audience that heard their commercial. It’s about measuring exposure. Say that you had 500,000 contacts with the audience. You’re able to say that they have truly listened. You only pay for the audience that listened.  And then we aren’t having a discussion whether my station is in a big or in a small territory or market, if it's famous or not.”

Digital and actual impressions is an equalizer in that regard.  You only sell the audience you truly have. The inventory available is priced for that and the client only buys an audience that is verifiable as truly listening. Those audience reports can be delivered in real time, and nearly real time, so an advertiser can have almost immediate insight into the impact o their campaign. For example, Muller said “You can track ad effectiveness in the same morning that a message played.” He added “A call to action works better than simply running commercials that are hit and miss.”

Starting with digital allows for greater targetability. So, a radio station doesn’t have to be in a format that is designed to attract everybody. He believes his approach benefits that which heretofore may have been considered niche. He closed our conversation by offering his opinion that “Satisfy a specific target audience and you can raise your CPM for ads. It can be higher than that of Meta, or Facebook, or whatever digital competitor you may have.” His point being that the impact radio has with the listener is much stronger than digital by itself. Stronger than a random display ad or audio without magnification.

It’s a different way to approach ad sales and revenue generation; and leads me to wonder if any North American broadcaster has the courage to try something this new and potentially revolutionary ... or if accepting the erosion of AQH and the current way of selling radio advertising will remain status quo.