BIA/Kelsey is stepping in to provide marketing and advertising professionals data it expected to receive from the RAB.
Mark Fratrik, SVP and Chief Economist at BIA/Kelsey, tells RBR + TVBR that quarterly reports providing an assessment of the radio industry’s total revenue will begin dissemination in Q3.
The reports will include data that incorporates over-the-air ad dollars, digital revenue, and nontraditional revenue, Fratrik confirms.
Since the RAB’s announcement that it would no longer distribute quarterly radio industry revenue produced by Miller Kaplan Arase & Co., which the advocacy association says allows it to focus on its core mission of promoting the radio industry’s positives, BIA/Kelsey evaluated its own standing as a third-party supplier of such data.
RAB CEO Erica Farber noted in an exclusive interview with RBR + TVBR that BIA/Kelsey data, along with data from Kantar Media, would provide media buyers and planners and marketers the info they needed to build the smartest brand campaigns.
Now, Fratrik says, the key is to increase coverage of revenue estimates, which are already done by BIA/Kelsey on a market-by-market basis. “The natural progression is to continue to monitor the radio industry,” he says.
Information gathering for BIA/Kelsey will involve data provided each quarter by publicly traded companies, information provided directly by its clients, and by information appearing in industry trade publications.
How important are quarterly earnings for the radio industry, given the RAB’s long-planned decision to stop distributing Miller Kaplan-produced reports?
“It is somewhat important for any industry to have a sense of what is going on,” Fratrik says, adding that as of 2008 BIA/Kelsey began to closely examine dollars on a local level.
What does the distribution of quarterly radio industry total revenue reports say about the credibility of BIA/Kelsey, now that Miller Kaplan’s data won’t be distributed by the RAB, which has tacitly endorsed both Fratrik’s company and Kantar Media?
“We already have credibility,” he says. “This report is a natural extension from people who care about the radio industry.”
