• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, April 15, 2011

As the radio business struggles to win back billions in ad spending, some of the key factors in getting advertisers to sign will be ease and accountability in terms of planning, buying, reporting and analyzing radio ads. Some of the major players in the radio business are introducing new Web-based platforms for tracking and analyzing radio spending and planning new radio ad campaigns.

Arbitron, the dominant radio ratings research firm, has partnered with Media Monitors to create new interactive tools offering users the latest radio ad campaign data from all markets covered by Arbitron's Portable People Meter.

The platform, called "Get a GRiP," allows Arbitron clients to see the frequency and reach of specific ad campaigns, which they can sort by advertiser, client, market, station, station genre, demographic target and schedule.

Among other things, "Get a GRiP" allows clients to conduct competitive comparisons for ad campaigns, breaking data down by GRPs, percent share of GRPs, commercial units and percent share of commercial units. Users can track station GRPs over time, as well as by hour and client.

Get a GRiP's tools should allow them to calculate spending and cost per point for various campaigns at the market level. All this data is available within two days of spots airing, meaning that advertisers can check on the effectiveness of radio buys and tweak them, if necessary, with a much faster turnaround time.

Also this week, Marketron announced the launch of a new, integrated online platform for reporting, analyzing, planning and buying radio inventory, and other media, if users wish. The new Marketron platform, called MediaScape, offers users access to a suite of capabilities that already exist independently -- including its Exchange, revenue builder and mobile platform.

"in one common operating environment that allows me to execute campaigns across different channels," according to Marketron CEO Steve Minisini. Users can also build in data integration from third-party services -- for example, for online measurement or ad-serving.

Because it is an open platform, Minisini said MediaScape can easily be expanded to interface with online exchanges for buying and selling other kinds of media, including print, TV, online, out-of-home. "We've built an open application layer that allows everyone to play together."

To that end, MediaScape can import financial and inventory information from other media, for example, to a common analytics dashboard; it can also be modified to handle billing for different sorts of media. Minisini concluded: "Anyone else in the industry can participate, and plug their services into the framework here."