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Australian radio industry takes first steps towards programmatic trading

Commercial Radio Australia has launched its automated radio booking service, the first step in developing an industry wide programmatic advertising trading platform.

Run by AudioNet, which won Commercial Radio Australia’s tender for the platform in December last year, the RadioMATRIX radio holdings service has been tested by various stations and advertisers over the past quarter.

 

Cox: 126,000 hours a year wasted

The service allows media agencies to view radio spots matched to their system, as well as monitor changes to booked advertising slots.

Various radio networks and agencies piloting automated services with AudioNET since 2013 and CRA commenced its tender process at the beginning for 2016.

RadioMATRIX will allow over 80 agencies to interact with 260 radio stations’ traffic management systems.

AudioNET chief executive officer, Dave Cox, said in a media statement: “There are almost 7,000 new agency bookings each month that currently agencies and networks collectively spend 126,000 hours per year manually managing. AudioNET’s RadioMATRIX platform will see CRA stations reduce this to just a few minutes per day.”

At this stage, although the system allows automation of managing inventory, it does not allow for trading in price in the way that online display ad networks do.

Joan Warner, chief executive officer of CRA said delivering the product in 18 months has been due to the sector working together: “The industry has achieved this milestone by working from day one as a united industry with a clear focus and objective. Subsequently we have achieved this in a very short period of time.”

Last year Warner told Mumbrella how the CRA was in the process of looking at a three step approach to introducing programmatic advertising to Australian radio: “The first would be an automated radio holdings, second data segmentation and third ‘programmatic’ trading further down the track.”

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