GfK’s Senior Global Product Manager Alex Tarvenkorn says his company is “using big data to handle big challenges in the broadcast industry.”
 
“The challenge is that there is no longer just one device being used for radio consumption, so we need to track and bring together all the data from many platforms,” he said during his presentation at Broadcast Asia in Singapore last week.
 
Survey companies now need to integrate many data sources: diaries, metering (via watches, people meters), on-device metering, census data from online player apps, log files and login data, making audience measurement in this multi-media environment complicated.

 
Using Singapore as an example, he discussed who is listening to radio online. The data is taken from a tv meter panel conducted by GfK in Singapore and was anonymised for the purposes of the presentation.
 
In Singapore, older people are starting to use online radio, with most listening on smartphones. Females listen more on tablets, while males use more PCs to listen to audio streams. There is high online listening in morning timeslots.

Collecting listening about the people and what platforms they listen on is highly important in the modern media environment, according to Tarvenkorn.
 
GfK is using multiple forms of measurement to build up a bigger data set and be able to get more accurate information about the people who are listening by matching common shared variables to create a ‘census panel,’ which is much bigger than just a small listener panel, therefore gives more reliable information.
 
“If you have a census panel you can ask people, anything and get more info than just audience profiles, you can do ad effectiveness studies and many things,” he said.
 
“Agencies tell me it’s a pain to have too many dashboards for on and offline data, it would be helpful to have it in one reporting tool,” he said, explaining that GfK has developed integrated dashboard tools for media buyers.
 
He estimates that between 30-40% of audio listening in Singapore is done online.