Could the combination of marketing research company Claritas and the ad tech company ArtsAI produce a new solution for measuring radio and audio listening? The two companies, which are uniting in an acquisition announced last week, are having discussions about it, a Claritas exec said last week.
Claritas already works with Audacy and other audio companies to measure the success of their ad campaigns for brand advertisers. Its acquisition of ArtsAI, which specializes in AI-based marketing measurement and optimization, already has advertisers and agencies buzzing about a one-stop marketing optimization solution that allows them to leverage artificial intelligence throughout the entire lifecycle of their multichannel marketing campaigns.
It turns out that both Claritas and ArtsAI have been looking into expanding their capabilities to measure audio consumption.
During a webinar last week, Kevin Greenwald, VP, Head of Advertising & Audience Products at Audacy, said his company has had talks with ArtsAI and Claritas about audience measurement. “Audacy has been having conversations with both ArtsAI and Claritas about solutions that they're working on for both radio and holistic audio measurement,” he said. Greenwald added that those conversations have increased since the Claritas acquisition of ArtsAI was announced.
Camden Weber, Account Director at Claritas, also appeared on the webinar and spoke of the “synergy and overlap” in what Claritas and ArtsAI have accomplished from a measurement perspective. “There's a ton of supplemental resources and insights and technologies that are only going to make visibility into digital and terrestrial and broadcast radio that much stronger,” Weber said. “So just having that holistic approach to audio campaign execution and measurement is really going to be a strength moving forward, and something that I think a lot of advertisers will come to expect and want.”
Later in the conversation, Weber clarified that he was talking about a potential standalone solution for the measurement of over the air radio. Claritas, he said, is having talks with ArtsAI about how their technology could help facilitate such a service. “It's definitely something that they [ArtsAI] were able to move more quickly on in terms of rolling out that as a capability,” Weber continued. “We've had some internal proof of concepts and tests, as we’ve continued to kick those tires. But again, now that we're one big happy family, where they have strengths, we can leverage them. So I think if there is an opportunity to expand on that, [we’re] definitely happy to have those conversations.”
While measuring audio listening is not a Claritas service available in the marketplace today, Greenwald said it is something Audacy has been talking about with Claritas.
The majority of the Audacy-presented webinar “Audio Measurement for the Modern Advertiser” – which also included Michael Biemolt, Executive VP, Digital Audio at Audacy – focused on using identity resolution and other techniques to optimize ad campaign performance. Weber also talked about new ways Claritas will be able to do that with the AI capabilities it is picking up from ArtsAI.
“AI is more than just a buzzword, I think it is truly going to be an integral part of the future of audience targeting, optimizations, identity resolution, faster processing,” Weber said. For example, ArtsAI currently works with advertising partners to identify in real time which ads are driving performance most efficiently. The system considers the market, time of day, device type and other variables to determine which piece of creative is served to which individual. “When those variables come into play, it’s serve ad A or serve ad B,” he explained. “This allows us to take that data and analyze in real time which creative is going to be driving that performance most efficiently. That's how they're using AI in that capacity from a targeting and creative perspective. We definitely have plans to integrate AI-powered technologies across our identity resolution, across our audiences, across our engineering and development to become more efficient across all of those different categories.”