Commentary

Bing Search Online Radio Carousel Presents Opportunities For Advertisers

I'm a music junkie and lyricist. I probably attend a dozen concerts annually, but try to hold out for the small venues and the best seats. Ask me the top three things I would bring to a deserted island and music would be on the list. So imagine my delight to discover that Bing, with the help of TuneIn, now allows streaming music lovers to discover more than 10,000 radio stations and formats through a search query from a browser, with many more stations coming in the next few months.

Go to Bing.com, search for "online radio stations," and click through the carousal to find everything from talk radio to music such as KYGO-FM, a country station in Colorado. The list focuses on stations east of the Mississippi rather than west, but the selection of available stations to find from this Internet search provides a good start to listen live. TuneIn lets you share the link on Twitter.

The combination of search, paid search and radio, especially when that radio station is based 2,000 miles away, brings an interesting ad-targeting opportunity for national advertisers to reach a local audience and local advertisers to reach a national audience based on the listener's location and taste in music or talk radio. It also supports cross-channel and cross-device ad targeting. Think live search ad targeting or radio through programmatic media channels.

Consider this. While in my teens a good friend and I would stay up all night searching for radio stations across the country using an AM radio. Yes, an AM-band radio. AM had the stronger signal during that time. In the middle of the night, maybe 1 a.m. or 2 a.m., when most radio and broadcast stations signed off the airwaves, you could use an AM radio receiver to tune into those stations with strong signals -- sometimes as far away as Colorado from Long Beach, California.

I'm not an engineer, but it seems to me that advertisers could use addressable radio, similar to the way addressable TV works, to target Texas-based consumers listening to a Baton Rouge, Louisiana radio station. I'm not referring to Pandora or other Internet-based stations, but traditional broadcast radio stations. No mobile app needed.

Aside from loving music, I'm grateful that I am old enough to have experienced the more simple things in life, especially in a world filled with so much noise.  

1 comment about "Bing Search Online Radio Carousel Presents Opportunities For Advertisers".
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  1. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, October 21, 2016 at 10:17 a.m.

    Very interesting----but first, you have to convince national advertisers that audio commercials are as erffective as TV commercials and second, you have to get them to think city by city, not just national. Im afraid that both are very difficult propositions. But good luck. I always root for the underdog---well, almost always.

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