Broadcast Radio Is Now Available Through DSPs

Broadcast radio inventory is coming to programmatic.

Viant struck a deal with iHeartMedia and its Triton Digital advertising platform that will make iHeart’s broadcast radio inventory available through Viant’s DSP, the companies announced Thursday.

Viant’s direct integration with iHeartMedia also allows both companies to match their data graphs and create shared IDs for targeting audiences in digital audio, as well as broadcast radio, where audience ID signals are scarce.

This data-matching should open more opportunities for advertisers to include radio, podcast and streaming music inventory in their omnichannel digital campaigns, said Richie Hyden, SVP of publisher partnerships at Viant.

Through an existing partnership, Viant's DSP had access to iHeartMedia's podcast and streaming music inventory, as well as inventory sourced from third-party audio publishers sold through Triton Digital's SSP. Now, Viant is one of a small number of DSPs that have direct access to iHeart's streaming, podcast and broadcast radio inventory.

SPO in audio

Making it easier for brand and agency omnichannel teams to buy radio and digital audio inventory programmatically should bring incremental demand to audio publishers, Hyden said. Increasing demand could help close the persistent gap between audio ad spend and audience engagement with radio, podcasts and streaming music, he said.

In 2024, users spent more than 20 % of their media time listening to audio, but the channel attracted 4,50 % of ad spend, according to eMarketer. Meanwhile, the research firm projected US audio ad revenue to grow by less than $1 billion between 2024 and 2028, to a total of $18,40 billion.

Potentially flat growth aside, programmatic is attracting a larger share of digital audio’s revenue gains. Programmatic accounted for 30 % of digital audio ad spend this year, up from 22 % in 2022.

Now, programmatic is coming for broadcast radio's share, which remains larger than digital audio's. And iHeartMedia's direct integration with Viant is another example of the trend.

This growing partnership is also part of the ongoing SPO trend in which DSPs are forging closer relationships with publishers, Hyden said.

According to Hyden, DSPs can improve their platform's value for buyers by adding access to more inventory and by improving addressability for campaign targeting and measurement. Publisher partnerships tick both of those boxes.

"DSPs are built with lots of bells and whistles, but they're powered by inventory and data," he said. "We have no plans to own supply, which means we need to lock arms with the tier-one pubs in CTV and audio and figure out the most efficient way to buy their inventory with the right signals."

Viant began forging direct partnerships with publishers, including iHeartMedia, through its Direct Access supply-path optimization (SPO) initiative starting in 2023. The DSP has also worked directly with iHeartMedia on audience ID matching going back three or four years, Hyden said.

An ID spine for radio

In order to facilitate audience matching and programmatic activation for radio, Triton Digital had to do plenty of work on its end, too.

First, Triton had to “wire up” iHeartMedia’s 800+ broadcast radio stations and connect their inventory to its SSP, said John Rosso, president and CEO at Triton Digital. Programmatic broadcast radio platform Jelli, which iHeartMedia acquired back in 2018, provided the technology layer to enable those connections, he said.

Then, Triton needed to create "an identity spine," or a way to enable user-level targeting, for broadcast radio, Rosso said. Unlike digital audio streaming apps, broadcast radio doesn't require users to log in with email addresses to listen to programming, which means radio lacks a valuable signal for creating targetable user IDs.

Triton built an audience platform that would allow it to take user profiles associated with iHeart’s digital audio audience, feed those user profiles into a probabilistic modeling graph and create targetable IDs for broadcast radio listeners that match those digital audio user profiles.

Say, for instance, an advertiser wants to target "home improvement intenders," Rosso said. IHeartMedia can identify prospects by matching its digital audio ID graph against data sourced from TransUnion to determine whether users own a home.

Then, to enable targeting a similar audience on broadcast radio, Triton determines which radio listeners resemble the addressable digital audio audience. It does so by matching its logged-in users against content-based contextual signals and other third-party data sources. From there, Triton and Viant combine their audience graphs to create targetable, shared user IDs.

The creation of these IDs also enables more straightforward measurement and attribution for radio campaigns, Rosso added.

For example, he said, broadcast radio often runs time-bound promos where users receive a certain attribution code or call to action only during specific times. Triton can use that data to create an inferred exposed audience data set, which it shares with measurement platforms to prove performance impacts from those ad exposures.

Plus, because of the direct connection between Viant and iHeart, Triton can give buyers measurement data down to the hour in which their ad was aired, and on which radio station. Which essentially lets them reverse-engineer which content their campaign ran against, Hyden said.

In addition, Hyden said, Viant traces ad exposures across radio, digital and CTV impressions and measures the performance impact of these different touch points as part of its full-funnel measurement offering.

A ‘full industry’ solution

Creating this framework for targeting, activation and measurement supports how today’s omnichannel advertisers prefer to buy ad inventory, Rosso said.

"People in the digital world are used to activating against a particular audience across multiple channels, but the outlier has been the broadcast channel because it wasn't connected in any way," he said. "This integration takes down that barrier."

Now, buyers can set up programmatic guaranteed deals for iHeart’s broadcast radio inventory, and that demand will have the same priority as direct-sold deals, according to Triton Digital.

Going forward, Triton is also exploring ways to bring those same connections to third-party radio broadcasters that currently sell only their digital audio inventory through Triton's platform. Such integrations could be ready to go live by the second half of next year, Rosso said.

“We expect that this will roll out beyond iHeart pretty quickly,” he said, “because we recognize that a full industry solution is what is required.”