Exclusives

Veritone on April 11 provided a closer look at the critical issues facing broadcast salespeople, including the ongoing issue of accurately measuring audience sizes, and explained how artificial intelligence (AI) can help.

The company also delved into how broadcast advertising is, according to Veritone, “reaffirming its timeless influence and relevance as the original influencers of our time, with intelligent technologies that watch, listen, and count brand exposures and audience response within radio and TV programming.”

The issues were discussed during a webinar, “An Exclusive Debrief: Using AI to Solve Broadcast Media’s Measurement Issue,” in which Stephanie Callihan, senior development lead at the Center for Sales Strategy and immediate past VP/market manager, Cox Media Group Houston, also explored the role of AI in solving broadcast media’s measurement issues, thereby increasing share of ad-spend while reducing advertiser churn.

Viewers were able to learn how AI is being used to demonstrate proof of performance and measure ad lift to unlock increased revenue opportunities for broadcast media across three areas: advertising and content intelligence, attribution, and archive and monetization.

“We’re really excited to have you here today and we have a really exciting topic to talk about, which is how AI is making broadcasters money,” Paul Cramer, managing director of media and broadcast at Veritone, said at the start of the webinar.

“For those of you who aren’t familiar with Veritone, we help you manage and monetize your content using AI, and we work with over 2, 000 media brands in six countries across cultural environments,” he pointed out, noting those brands include CBS News, CNBC, CNN, CNBC, Cox Radio and Television, Hearst Television, iHeartMedia and NBCUniversal.

“But today we’re going to focus on two primary use cases of AI” when it comes to making money: One, through content intelligence, and number two, through advertising intelligence,” he said.

He talked next about the evolution of AI, noting that “a lot of times today we hear about AI in the form of generative AI; we hear of AI as a way to automate workflows and remove the drudgery and the mundane human tasks” that workers are typically stuck handling themselves.

“If you think about AI, it really creates structured data,” he said, pointing to a recent report that said 80-90 percent of the audio and video content being created still is “completely unstructured.”

He explained: “That means we cannot search for moments inside of that content. It’s not indexed. What’s great with structuring content is it offers a lot of benefits. And if you roll back the clock and think of the earliest days of the internet, probably some of us remember what it was like to go do research prior to the internet. You had to go to the library, there was the Dewey Decimal system, there was microfilm. We had media and articles and stuff like that that just had a little bit of metadata attached to it. Maybe it was an abstract or a synopsis of what was in the article, but I couldn’t literally search for something within that article.”

But, he pointed out, “when we started to digitize the world’s text, and it started to go online, we had … [companies] that made all that text structured and searchable so it could be quantifiable,  measurable and targetable.”

Flash forward and “AI is doing the same exact thing now for audio and video content,” he said.  This is “moving us away from just classifying that content to understanding it,” he noted.  And that “helps you with your sales strategy and helps you monetize content that you own from licensing opportunities,” he said, adding that is “setting the stage and future proofing your organization so that you can start to feed these new large language models.”

Cox Media Group’s radio and TV divisions started “using AI to transcribe and to index and quantify everything that’s being delivered in their programming in real-time,” he told viewers. Those analytics are then used as part of the Cox sales team’s “strategy for business development and revenue retention,” he said.

Cox used Veritone’s AI in Houston to get credit for running ad campaigns, Callihan pointed out, explaining that, with Al, “all of a sudden we had this ability to get credit on different campaigns,” she said.

As an example, she said: “We would do a large campaign during rodeo season, and we could go in and search by that sponsor and really show in almost real-time how many times we had mentioned that sponsor on that day, within that week during the campaign. And it allowed us to do things and show the attribution of what we were doing quickly, whereas … even a few years ago, if you were putting together a recap, you were never really sure if you were getting everything, short of listening and going through the logger.”

But, using AI, “you’re able to get credit for absolutely everything that you’re doing, and then what that allows you to do is, when you start getting that credit, it creates immediate renewals,” she told viewers. “You’re able to go in at the end of the campaign and show the success of the campaign and build that renewal and move it forward.”

That, responded Cramer, “really lines it up with a lot of the research we’ve done internally where you’ve talked about, ‘Hey, how do I get renewal faster? How do I reduce churn?’ We’ve seen that, when advertisers are connected to this data, they cancel 40 to 50 percent less than advertisers who aren’t receiving this data, and they also spend about 15 percent more because … they’re seeing the results of the campaign, including the true delivery of everything they’re getting outside of just Spotify.”

The webinar was held by Veritone in partnership with The Center for Sales Strategy.