• by Larry Dobrow , January 13, 2004

In the most recent in an ongoing series of surveys of online radio listeners, radio veteran Ken Dardis has unearthed another few morsels of data designed to spur advertisers to take the nascent but rapidly growing medium more seriously.

The results of the survey, RRadio's 20th on the topic, aren't especially surprising. Listeners responded that the most effective advertising appears on television (30.8 percent), with newspapers and magazines (19.7 percent), radio (16.3 percent), and the Internet (14.5 percent) trailing behind. The findings were culled from 2,079 listeners of RRadio Network's community of 42 online radio stations.

But it is the way Dardis, president of RRadio, plans to employ the data that is really interesting. Rather than assault the media with a euphoric blurb touting "startling new findings about this sensational new medium," Dardis hopes to use it to lure advertisers to online radio. The goal is to crack their skepticism about the viability of the medium - and with 20 surveys worth of information in hand, he's just about ready to make his first series of approaches.

"The intent is to go to auto manufacturers with this data and say, 'Look, these are the people you want to be reaching with your messages,'" he explains. "We're presenting a qualified audience of buyers to them on a plate." It goes without saying that he'll have reams of demographic data in hand during these conversations. "I've been saying it for a long time now, online radio's listeners are more affluent and more educated than almost any other audience," recounts Dardis. "It's like with classical music radio stations - they're not selling the number of people listening, they're selling the quality of their audience."

As for the current state of Internet radio, Dardis believes that the medium won't truly take off without more aggressive industry-wide promotion. "What we have to do is sell the act of listening to radio online," he notes. "Right now, most people are selling their individual stations." A major factor in its favor is that technology has improved considerably in just a few short months. "At first, only real techies were listening," Dardis continues. "Now, with broadband getting bigger and bigger, a lot of the dropout and buffering problems are gone. That reduces the learning curve."

RRadio Network is one of a handful of companies operating under the banner of Audio Graphics, Dardis' television and radio production firm. Others include www.RadioRow.com (a portal for radio stations that stream) and www.RRadioMusic.com (a site designed to expose unsigned artists to radio programmers). The company also produces software products.