What Is Programmatic Audio and How Does It Work With Radio Ads?

NOTE: This blog is a transcript from a podcast and therefore may contain errors.

Shannon Allen: Welcome to Digital Marketing ROI. I’m your host, Shannon Allen, and I’m here with my co-host, Krystal. Krystal, how are you today?

Krystal Vivian: I’m doing great, Shannon. It’s, nice to come off of a long weekend and get right back into it.

Shannon Allen: Labor Day is over, and September is here, and I’ve even got my fall, Zoom example in my background, so it looks like I’m sitting and there’s fall leaves in the background.

Yep. I’m so good at my- I’ve- … using my AI for that.

Krystal Vivian: I’ve fully transferred over into my pumpkin spice coffee creamer.

Shannon Allen: I did buy some. Ava wanted some, pumpkin spice. I found the sugar-free, so we’re gonna make a couple. So yeah, she wanted to- Yeah … try it.

Krystal Vivian: it’s yummy. I like the Chobani.

Shannon Allen: Okay.

Krystal Vivian: That’s my favorite one. It’s not sugar-free, but it is good, and as a little treat, that’s what I give myself.

Shannon Allen: That’s awesome. Yeah. Well, today we’re gonna talk about, another launch that we’ve had recently, at FDS, and also with our radio reps, which we talked about briefly under the digital essentials, but I wanna go deeper on the programmatic audio conversation.

and really dig in so our listeners, as well as some of our, radio reps can dive in deeper on how programmatic audio works, and how great it couples with an already existing, platform that they’re doing on the radio side, right? With the local stations.

It’s a much needed enhancement to what we already do, right?

Krystal Vivian: 100%. As somebody who listens to almost exclusively digital audio, I’m very excited about it,

Shannon Allen: Yes.

Krystal Vivian: let’s start with the basics. Programmatic audio. For a listener who hears the word programmatic, and they start to tune out, or they’re like, “Ah, that sounds too technical,” what is programmatic audio?

What does it actually mean?

Shannon Allen: So programmatic is really just describing how it gets bought, right? It’s the fancy word for the auction. It’s the way it gathers multiple versions of audio, and we can talk about music and podcasting and other radio stations, and Audible, bringing all of that inventory together and doing it from a programmatic buy.

So it ties into the auction, right? The software matches the ad to the right listener based on targeting, geo, right? And layers into the right listener, and it can, happen and deliver within an hour of the buy, right? So just like what we do on the digital side when we have programmatic display and programmatic CTV, this is exactly the same thing, it’s just what is the delivery and what the, channel is, right?

In this case, it’s all audio. So it’s programmatic audio. To simplify, we just call it digital audio, but it’s what we’re doing every day, right? We’re getting in our car and we’re- listening to our local radio. We’re putting in a podcast. You know, yesterday I’m out mowing the lawn, I’m listening to a different podcast.

I’ve moved over to music. I’m listening to Spotify, just listening to some ’80s hits, right? So it’s doing it as a better way of deciding where our listeners are, where our customers are consuming what we do. We’re gonna reach them through the programmatic buy, right? So fancy word, right? It’s basically just finding them other places and doing it as an auction.

The word programmatic is used more commonly, obviously, in the digital world. But when it comes to audio specific, if you think about it, it’s not any different than a programmatic display buy, where we’re trying to reach our message and deliver that ad in front of wherever they’re at. Same for CTV.

We’re gonna deliver that commercial, that video, wherever they’re at programmatically. We’re doing the exact same, but this is the audio version, just like the commercial that’s running on your local B100 country station,

Krystal Vivian: So you kind of touched on this a little bit, but it all goes back to the consumer journey, and the audio consumer journey is unique for how people are engaging with that audio throughout the day.

Can you talk about the audio consumer journey and where this fits in?

Shannon Allen: Yes. So right now, our radio sellers are out there working with local businesses on what we know is still very powerful, which is your local radio, Right? And they can buy a flight schedule on the local radio station as well as local stream.

One thing that Federated Media does different than a lot of radio companies, we don’t simulcast our local streaming with when the commercials run. So what you’re hearing, if you’re listening through the app and streaming our local B100 station, and you’re also have it tuned in on to the radio behind you, you’re gonna hear different commercials, right?

It should be a different audience. So you have multiple ways already when you buy from your local radio rep to hear your radio commercial on air, and then at another point in time, that listener could be listening through the app and streaming it, and they’re gonna hear a commercial in a different format.

This is just one more layer, right? So we know that at any given time, there are consumers out there that are listening to audio through multiple different ways. We’re not just all listening to radio anymore, but there’s still a huge volume, right? 53% of consumers are listening in their car. That’s a great number to think about.

So when … And I’m one of those. I get in my car, I tune in to local radio stations, and that’s what I’m listening to, ’cause I wanna hear the weather, I wanna hear my local, on air personality. they’re like my friend. Like, I pretend like I know them, and I do because I work here too, right? But it’s

That is really a great feeling. But also, as I talked about, for me, I get on my lawnmower to mow on a Sunday, and I’m not listening to local radio. I’m actually listening to a podcast or music, right? And there’s multiple ways to do that. So the way that we talk about this is truly the audio consumer journey because everybody does it a little bit different, and we don’t wanna decide where they’re taking in their audio, right?

So for instance, I use Spotify. I do not use Pandora, but I did at one time, right? But I don’t have to choose because I have multiple inventory. You don’t have to just go by Spotify because you’re limiting yourself to what you’re buying if you’re deciding that’s the only place. So if you’re listening to music, where are you listening to it?

Krystal Vivian: I listen on Apple Music.

Shannon Allen: Okay. All right.

Krystal Vivian: Occasionally on YouTube during work if I’m looking for something specific, but that’s usually because I wanna watch a video.

Shannon Allen: Do you ever use Spotify or Pandora?

Krystal Vivian: I use Spotify occasionally. But where I hear ads mostly is podcasts. I listen to a lot- of podcasts, and so I hear a lot of digital audio ads that way. Also when I’m listening to audiobooks.

Shannon Allen: Yep. So think of this where the consumer is usually consuming any kind of audio.

first and foremost, it’s the commute, whether that’s the drive in the morning or the drive in the evening, or you could be second shift or third shift, right? Whenever you’re commuting, you’re in your car. So we know the commute, driving in a vehicle, traveling, whatever you’re doing, that is one way of the consumer journey.

Mm-hmm. Another one is when you’re at work, right? You could be sitting at your desk working on something, and you could be streaming something, or you could be listening to your local stream. You could be also listening to your local radio. You could be listening to a podcast, right?

Krystal Vivian: Mm-hmm.

Shannon Allen: you could be working out.

You could be going to the gym after work and working out and listening to whatever form of audio that you want to listen to. Or you could be at home cooking dinner and you are listening to, you have it on your TV, but it’s a podcast, right? Mm-hmm. You’re not watching TV. You just want to hear music.

Mm-hmm. So when I talk about the audio consumer journey, I’m thinking about any way that audio specific is consumed, and there’s multiple ways for us to be able to consume it. And we don’t… The good news is with programmatic, we don’t have to decide if they’re streaming music, if they listen to Pandora versus Spotify or SiriusXM, what podcast they like, right?

I’m a true crime. It could be a sports podcast they’re listening to. It could just be a sports radio station they’re listening to, right? Mm-hmm. We also have the ability to have tune into broadcast radio.

Some of the bigger companies out there are selling their local inventory through a programmatic buy. So companies like Cumulus Media and Townsquare and iHeartRadio and TuneIn, you can listen to it even if you don’t have Townsquare in your local area but you want to listen, you could tune into their local country, right?

And then last but not least, we have Audible. So when I talk about specifically the consumer journey, though, that’s what I’m talking about is where you’re at. Are you in your car? Are you out doing a run? Are you at the gym?

Are you at home cooking, right? Are you sitting at work and you like to listen to something? So that journey could be anywhere, and the good news is we don’t have to dictate or decide. We can reach them in many different ways wherever they decide to tune in from an audio standpoint.

Krystal Vivian: Well,

It’s very smart to kind of compare this to the CTV, because it’s like we don’t wanna choose that somebody is watching Hulu. We don’t wanna choose that somebody is listening to Spotify, because it’s less about what they’re listening to and more about who the audience is.

Shannon Allen: And listen to this audience.

So 228 million Americans listen to online audio every single month- which is 79% of the population that’s 12 plus, right? That’s a huge number, just a huge number. You can’t compete with that, right? And more and more, businesses are shifting their TV budgets around. They’re moving some into CTV, but there’s also a huge shift that’s moving into, digital audio because they know that consumers decide how they’re entertained or how they take in their entertainment, whether that be through streaming television or it could be streaming audio.

Krystal Vivian: Well, and still have 53% of people listening to the radio, but they’re not just listening to the radio. They’re listening to everything else, too.

Shannon Allen: Exactly.

Krystal Vivian: It’s just to where it fits it into their journey throughout the day.

Shannon Allen: and digital audio right now in 2026, it’s not quite there, but it’s nearly equal to terrestrial radio.

So terrestrial radio is sitting at about 10.3 billion, and digital audio ad spend is, like, 9.4 billion. Now, keep in mind, there’s also some really big numbers in there, because you think about the Joe Rogans of the world- the really big, what I consider, a walled garden, because to run with them you’re spending $100,000 a month.

So it does really push that. But we have such a high access of platform to reach the consumer on that audio journey wherever they’re at, that we have a really good viewership or listenership of that, right?

Krystal Vivian: for, FDS, when we are running programmatic audio, where do those ads run?

And I know, like, in CTV, we always talk about that all streaming video is not created equally, because it all comes back to the targeting and what you’re capable of doing, and we can see that based on CPM. So is it the same? So it’s really two-part question. One is, where are our ads running? And then two- How do you know if you’re getting a quality audio, programmatic audio buy?

Shannon Allen: So first let’s talk about what we’ve categorized. So we really look at, I say four, I almost call sports its own, because sports could be so multi. It could be listening on a podcast, but it could also be listening to a radio station, right? So we categorize it as five things.

Streaming music, which is Spotify, Pandora, SiriusXM. We have podcasts, right? And that could be Apple Podcast, could be PodcastOne. We have what we consider flagship sports. So we have access to Barstool Sports, which has a little bit of both, has podcasting and, like, the SiriusXM, episodes. We have CBS Sports, right?

We have Blue Wire. And then we have what I talked about, which was broadcast radio, where somebody might have moved here from Tennessee, but they still love to listen, and they can tune in listening directly to somebody that’s owned by Cumulus Media is selling their inventory, and they can still use, listen to it on the app.

And then the fifth one is the spoken word. So this is the Audible of the world, right? This is when you’re listening to audiobooks.com and you have a subscription. So those are the main five. So when you ask is it created equal, absolutely not. Now, I looked at quite a few different partners to work with us on, and some of them just live, some of them don’t have the Audible, some don’t have the specifics into sports.

Most live in the streaming music, the podcast, and the broadcast radio. That’s normally what you see. One of the things as part two of this is we have two different ways to buy it. You can just buy, truly run a network, without any targeting, just run it wherever in a geography that makes sense, whether that’s Fort Wayne or South Bend or Kalamazoo or wherever that is.

But we actually have access to what we consider premium inventory, and that’s what we break it down to those five. And then within those, we can show the client actually our publisher sites, right? The big ones that you’re gonna remember. Some of these you might never have heard of, right? Like on streaming music, Deezer was one of them that I had to look up.

Pandora’s on there. iHeartRadio’s on there. SiriusXM is on there, right? Under podcast, same kind of thing. Apple Podcast, probably one of the best, the most well-known. PodcastOne is another one. AudioChuck was one that I knew that had capabilities. That’s where I listen to my Crime Junkie. And then you look at flagship sports.

You have Barstool Sports, CBS Sports, you have Blue Wire, right? And then there was a couple that I wasn’t familiar with because I’m not as interested in it, but it’s what’s considered a premium publisher list.

Krystal Vivian: Mm-hmm.

Shannon Allen: So we have the ability to do both a run-of-network or a premium list that we can also layer on targeting.

But to answer your part one and part two, I feel like the way that we’ve set this up, we really can help a client with any kind of audio strategy that we need to based on how they can buy directly from us

Krystal Vivian: I love that. let’s get into the targeting then.

So say I own a business here in Fort Wayne, and I am working with my local radio station that I love to run on, I’ve always ran with them, and I wanna layer in digital audio. How do you decide for me as a business if I should run, run of network, or if I should layer in targeting, and how does that targeting work?

Shannon Allen: to me, an audience targeting layer is always going to, have more of effect because you’re gonna have more one-on-one conversations, right? Run of network has its place, and I always think of what is the product that you’re marketing. If you’re selling phones, you’re a phone company and you’re selling phone service, there’s not a lot of targeting.

You might say, “Oh, you know, we generally reach, Verizon reaches this, this, this, and this.” Well, truthfully, anybody probably could be a Verizon buyer, right? So when you think about what the product is that you sell, you don’t need as much targeting. Then just run a network, and just layer your geo.

‘Cause geo is always part of this. That’s the beauty of this. So now I am saying in the Fort Wayne market, I’m gonna layer in a geo of just the Fort Wayne market. I could go a little bit farther, I could add in a couple of the bigger cities around Fort Wayne if I wanted to, or I could just say Fort Wayne and list all the ZIP codes out.

And then I could say, “You know what? I, the product that I’m marketing, is Doritos,” all right? I’m gonna run a Doritos ad. Well, everybody likes Doritos, but maybe it’s a younger demographic, so I could layer in a younger generation, or we’re gonna target the mom, right? You’re a car dealer and you’re gonna market minivans.

You’re gonna target maybe the person that’s making that decision, right? Somebody in the market for an auto, specifically that’s a mom. Chances are that’s a great audience, right? Now remember, as you start to add an audience in, the audience becomes smaller. So we make this as simple as possible. We take the thinking out of it.

Tell us what you’re trying to accomplish, give us the geography, and tell us who you want to try to target. Describe the customer you want. What’s the age? What’s the income? What’s the geography? What are they shopping for? Now, you brought one up to me, not too long ago that one of the radio sellers was trying to market to somebody that’s a mechanic who also is looking for a job right now.

Well, I can do one of the two. I can target people that are more likely that fall in that mechanic area. It’s not black and white like search engine marketing, right? I don’t know somebody at any given time that’s looking for a job, but I can do my best than guessing and run a network to everybody to try to just target somebody that’s more of a blue collar worker, a mechanic, that kind of thing.

So you have to be careful. you don’t have the capabilities that search engine marketing have- but you do have the capabilities of describing your typical audience and customer, and then we match the data and the segment that fits and picks the platform to run on. And in this case, we don’t pick a platform.

We just say, “Here’s who we’re trying to reach. Go find me that wherever they’re going to listen and consume audio.”

Krystal Vivian: And so when we run, those campaigns, on the back end, we can see what publishers- those ads are running on. And that mechanic, that body shop that is looking to hire mechanics, might see a dramatically different publisher list than a car dealer who’s trying to market minivans to soccer moms.

Shannon Allen: Absolutely, ’cause we’re following the targeting, right? Yes. The segment has to be layered on. I would recommend anybody listening to this, don’t go so deep. I always give the example, I can’t do the blonde hair, one blue eye, one green eye with a red shirt on, right?

Nobody can target that, right? Yeah. But I can do adults 25 to 54 shopping for a vehicle in the next 90 days. I can do, I wanna reach a younger audience who might switch banks, that- Mm-hmm … you know, this might just be a younger audience. I can say I’m looking for adults 45 to 70 that are caring for an aging parent.

Krystal Vivian: Mm-hmm.

Shannon Allen: I can look for homeowners that are interested in appliances, right? There’s some capabilities. You give us what you want, but make sure expectations are there as well. We can’t match it exactly, but give us a really good idea of the ideal customer profile and we’ll do our best to match the data by layering in the right segment audience.

 

Krystal Vivian: Well, and I think it’s really important, too, that your audio, your actual creative, your message matches who you wanna talk to as well. And you’ll see that lift happening-

Shannon Allen: Yes …

Krystal Vivian: if your targeting is right, if your message is right.

Shannon Allen: Well, and also, if you’re using, let’s say you’re WOWO.

So WOWO is our conservative station in the Fort Wayne market. It’s, you know, been around forever. people that run on WOWO, they love Kayla, they love everything about it, and they’re running their commercials currently on there because they believe in that audience. Mm-hmm. You can also mirror the audience, right?

You can say, “I want to find the same type of listeners, but I want to find them as they’re listening through a programmatic buy,” right? I want to find them on podcasting and different, Spotifys, but same type of audience. So there’s multiple ways to play out the strategy. You don’t always have to dictate A, B, C, and D.

Sometimes you just have a really good commercial on why your business, and you know that you’re most likely to be, somebody that’s a conservative audience fits into the audience that you, is your ideal customer profile.

Krystal Vivian: Well, let’s bring it back to the topic of our podcast.

Why does pairing radio with digital audio deliver a better ROI than buying either one of them on its own? And what should a business owner expect to see in terms of results and when?

Shannon Allen: Well, I think gone are the days that we can dictate where consumers, are at any given time, right? We know that the digital world has changed what we do and how we do it.

This is not any different than broadcast has been doing for years. In the broadcast world, they think they’re probably buying more CTV than they are, and they go to their local station and they say, “Okay, I wanna run.” They’re gonna first deliver on their owned and operated, and then they’ll layer into programmatic world.

In this case with what we do, we’re trying to expand that audience, that consumer audience. So us, instead of dictating I’m gonna do a buy over here with Spotify, and I’m gonna keep with my local radio, and I’m also gonna buy this podcast, do it as an auction. Bring it all together. Do it so it’s a cohesive strategy, which is ROI in itself, right?

So that’s step one, is having the strategy involved is always gonna bring a return on investment because you’re not piecemealing what you’re trying to accomplish, and you’re not trying to dictate where your consumer takes in audio anymore, right? We’re gonna find them wherever they’re at based on what we have at our fingertips.

Part two of this is the reporting. So we absolutely get reporting with this because we do get to place a pixel, and we know with any of the programmatic, we not only can report attribution through their local radio because we have the ability to watch to see if they’re seeing website visits increase.

We have the ability to place a pixel with all the programmatic and track that we delivered that commercial programmatically through audio, and then within 30 days they came back to the website. So that is something that radio has never been able to offer, it’s something TV can’t offer, unless you’re doing CTV, right?

So very similar to the way we track CTV is we track what we call a conversion or really what we call a website view-through, which means we know we delivered them the commercial, the audio commercial, and then within 30 days they came back to the website because they remembered us, right? We’re top of mind.

So you can actually track now how is your dollar being spent, am I getting return on it, right? But that’s not always why we buy branding messages, right? our goal is to have a good reach and a good frequency. If you’re not getting a lot of conversions, you might need to increase your reach and your frequency, or you may need to pull back and you might need to adjust.

But that is what the reporting does, is really helps us to understand is your money being spent well, and do we have the right strategy behind it? So yeah, there’s really lots of ROI now that we’ve never really had, and that’s what I get excited about, is giving, not only arming our radio sellers with the ability to expand the audio consumer journey, but give them the reason to go back in there the next month and show them that not only does your local radio work, your local stream works, but this programmatic audio, we’re gonna have the same message and the same strategy.

Which any time you have consistency, is always gonna tie to return on investment.

Krystal Vivian: Well, and you’ll see that frequency will go then up, because you’re getting them on the terrestrial, you’re getting them on the local stream, and you’re getting them on the digital audio.

Shannon Allen: Yeah. To me, this is an easy sell to somebody that’s already doing this. Let us do it for you and put strategy behind it, and not work with multiple vendors. Mm-hmm. Number two is realizing that as valuable as local radio is, we can expand your reach and frequency.

You also can reach somebody that might never listen to your local radio station, but you’re reaching them because they do listen to Spotify all the time, or Pandora all the time.

Krystal Vivian: Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Shannon Allen: So chances are you’re not expanding frequency, you’re adding to who you’re reaching. So new people, but in some cases, like you and I, we talked about we do both.

We’re still listening to our local radio, but I’m also gonna hear that commercial if I’m in the right target audience while I’m listening to, hopefully, Crime Junkies, right? I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I’m totally in the market right now.”

Krystal Vivian: Well, and then think about how impactful that is for a consumer to have that consistency of message in every different place that they’re listening to audio, and that you’re getting that name recognition.

You’re building that brand awareness, and then when they’re ready to make a purchase, they’re there.

Shannon Allen: Exactly. Yep. We have something for the radio sellers to work with their clients now that has a lot of strategy behind it. I mean, not only the other digital essentials we’ve discussed, but just the, the digital audio consumer journey on its own gets me excited that we’re reaching them wherever they’re taking in audio.

However they’re taking in audio.

Krystal Vivian: Truly a- Yeah … a fully 100% picture.

Shannon Allen: So we are excited that this is launching, and I can’t wait to see where we’re at in 90 days to see how many of our clients that are excited that we offer this now, right?

Krystal Vivian: Yeah. I’m excited too.

Shannon Allen: Yes. Thank you to our listeners, and thank you, Krystal, and tune in to our next episode of Digital Marketing ROI.

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