Media Insultant 9.16.26 Flashback to KSFO better days. How's the new Stacker news format? And iHeart launches Audiograph..

Okay.

With another tech story implemented by iHeart, which that just seems to be, you know, iHeart just seems to be killing off the salespeople, doesn't it, Keith? Every time you turn around, they've got programmatic buying, they've got this new program called Audiograph.

I mean, are there ever going to be salespeople anymore?

Well, and that was the subject of Jerry Del Caliano's column yesterday, which was about how the sales departments are kind of outsourced third-party representative firms.

I mean, so in other words, there's so many partnerships that these broadcast companies have with their digital partners, you know, the Facebooks and the YouTubes and the you know, SEO folks and all that stuff that all media salespeople are doing now are repping third parties.

Third party media, yeah.

And hardly any time left to sell their radio station or their TV spots.

You know, and certainly in iHeart's case, I mean, I think they'd love nothing more than to sell 100% of their inventory programmatically.

And that way they wouldn't have to pay any sales commissions

or

have any salespeople for that matter.

Or have any salespeople.

Or sales managers.

Tell us about this audiograph scheme that they've got going.

Well, as we know, with most things digital, the explanation for the technology is needlessly complicated and uses words that you just go in one ear and write out the other.

But let me see if I can simplify it.

In essence, as I understand it, iHeart takes their streaming data from their radio stations that they stream, and that amounts to about 10% to 20% of their total audience for their radio stations.

And they project it to total audience and demo numbers that will match up with the data that the programmatic platforms and the other digital data buying services need.

And then they blend it with third-party transunion data, which is credit cards, credit union, or credit scores, that kind of thing.

So they seem to be able to somehow, this is over my pay grade, they somehow be able to translate sales into the radio spots that ran...

On the radio station.

Yeah.

I

don't know how that works yet.

So anyway, I think the bottom line on it is they mix it all up and they can track audience response through sales and through the web traffic.