Station-level occurrence detail for local radio advertising covers over 825 stations in 45 top radio markets. Prior to January 2021 reporting, station-level occurrence detail for local radio advertising covered 36 top radio markets.

Ad Collection and Processing Procedures

Local radio monitoring use proprietary, patent-protected, audio pattern matching technology to detect and identify radio advertisements. The software algorithm processes radio station recordings, detects known patterns and repeating unknown patterns. Known ads are automatically added to the database, while new ads discovered are then reviewed for classification. All Local Radio reporting will include detections that are 10 seconds or longer. Live spots are not monitored.

Ad occurrences are classified using our Vivvix Central database nomenclature and taxonomy. Specific categories may receive further creative level review in effort to add a more granular level of classification.

As of January 2021, the monitoring process is a hybrid approach. Over-the-air (OTA) stations using hardware and radio capture cards installed in secured hosting facilities are used for monitoring in each of the 25 US OTA markets. Once the broadcast is recorded and fingerprinted, the fingerprints are then transferred back for processing. For the remaining 20 markets, the monitoring is via stream (Terrestrial Online) using local market proxies. The data sets will look identical in reporting. Prior to January 2021, monitoring was representative of OTA stations in 36 markets.

OTA Markets

Streaming Markets

*Spanish-language Only

^ Effective September 1st, 2022

Ad Expenditure Estimation

Local radio station advertising costs are developed through the application of SQAD costs and audience impression data. Average costs are developed for each standard radio daypart and applied on a per spot basis within each daypart. Costs are updated monthly.

Please note that while the Local Radio Service and the National Spot Radio Service each provide market-level brand expenditures, National Spot Radio does not have station occurrence detail. In this way, an unknown proportion of the ad activity captured by the Local Radio Service is also reflected in the National Spot Radio Service, and vice-versa, resulting in the same advertising spot is being reported multiple times. National Advertising for Syndicated/Network programming which clears on a monitored local market station is also included in reporting as part of the Local Radio Service. Because of the different reporting bases (market level vs. station-level), it is not possible to determine the amount of duplication between services, nor is it possible to integrate occurrences with expenditures for National Spot Radio.