Derrick Gray: Radio's New Way to Count
Nearly six years after I released an episode called Death of the Diary, It's the dawn of a new era for Canadian radio with the release of Radio Local Plus by Numeris.
Derrick Gray, Chief Research and Operations Officer at Numeris, joins me to explain Radio Local Plus—the hybrid ratings system replacing the online radio diary in 22 Canadian markets. The system combines streaming information with online and telephone surveys to estimate total listening, including traditional over-the-air radio.
Derrick explains how Numeris turns device-level streaming activity into demographic audience estimates, filters bots and abnormally long sessions, and determines whether a listener belongs to the local market. We also discuss why testing revealed significantly more audience reach than expected—and what Numeris had to fix before launch.
Radio Local Plus will deliver four ratings releases annually using a 13-week rolling average, replacing the diary’s two annual releases and 48-week average. That should give programmers and advertisers a more current view of changing listener behaviour.
The Three Best Things We Talked About:
- How Radio Local Plus combines streaming data with audience surveys to measure total radio listening
- Why the new system found more listeners than the diary—and what Numeris learned during testing
- How quarterly ratings and future impression-based metrics could change radio programming and advertising
Radio Local Plus is not the finished destination. It is the first stage of a larger Numeris audio strategy that could eventually include additional markets, national radio reach and audience metrics that are easier to compare with podcasts and other digital media.
Listen to the episode to understand what is changing, what is staying the same and why the first Radio Local Plus results could look very different from the ratings radio has relied on until now.
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