Indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: AdEx India is now moving into Radio Ad monitoring and analysis as well. Although, measuring of listnership is still awaited, the radio advertising industry pegged at Rs 2.2 billion can now have access to a radio monitoring service. This being an endeavour to cater to advertisers, media specialist agencies, publication Groups, TV channels amongst others to provide one-stop solutions.

This comes as a big move for the media industry who have been asking for an analysis hub for Radio Advertising for a long time.

Says Tam Media Research VP Atul Phadnis,"We have delivered it to the industry. There has been a demand for a scientific and timely Radio Monitoring service. AdEx India has been working on it for quite some time now. However, before we delivered it, we wanted to do a thorough check of the market realities and evaluate the technologies that can best support these services. What you see is the coming together of two powerhouses - AdEx India and AirCheck - to give this industry the most scientific, timely, effective and a wide range of analysis of advertising in Radio. We are very happy indeed to have partnered this wonderful feature with a Radio specialist like AirCheck."

This Radio AdEx effort done in technical collaboration with AirCheck, USA which is known to develop audio recognition technology for broadcasters, print media and agencies, providing same-day spot and song airplay data will cover radio stations across four Indian metros. They being:

Says RCS India General Manager Elliot Stechman, "We are the world leaders in the Radio monitoring software technology. The growth of the Radio FM industry in India has been amazing and we expect this to grow even further in the years to come. Added to that is a hugely successful and dynamic advertising market in India. It is a wonderful coming together of two giant organizations. We look forward to an interesting relationship with AdEx India - India's largest ad monitoring powerhouse which brings with it industry experience of several generations. We are committed to bring in world class technology through AirCheck that will power Radio AdEx thus giving path breaking Radio ad monitoring evaluation and analysis."

AdEx India derives its strength from a truly GloCal (Global + Local) setup. With consistent technology and software transfers from Nielsen Media Research-International which runs AdEx services across the Globe, AdEx has an Indian counterpart that specialises in 16 Languages.

As per industry estimates, the overall radio industry is growing at around 22 per cent annually. Private FM players contributing 45 per cent towards this growth pie. The four metros during the period between July and September 2004, Chennai contributed for 81 per cent of local advertising followed by Delhi at 70 per cent, and Kolkata and Mumbai at 66 per cent respectively.

Interestingly, Chennai emerged as the most developed retail market; Mumbai and Kolkata contributing the least across the 4 metros

Across the three platforms - TV, radio and print, Radio seems closest to print in terms of the product categories advertised. Across the four metros, on an average, radio advertising rate is estimated at 9 minutes per hour of during the morning daypart, commonly referred to as SPT or super prime time slot for radio.

The clutter was observed to be much lesser during the afternoons but peaked again to about 8 minutes per hour during the second SPT slot, which is early evening. Advertising pattern also saw a different trend across the four metros: The analysis revealed that while Delhi and Mumbai enjoyed two distinct peaks during the morning and early evening, Chennai peaked the highest as compared to other cities during the morning but there was no peak during the evening at all. Kolkata radio although attracted the lowest advertising duration through the day, the clutter levels were quite stable across the day.

Another notable point here was that during the evening slot only Delhi and Mumbai observed radio advertising peaks again.

Although, subscription rates have not yet been decided, AdEx is very optimistic about the radio AdEx, and believes that this offering will help media agencies as well as clients plan and buy on radio more cost effectively.