eMarketer Report: Radio Does Not Get Its Fair Share

Radio executives have been saying for years that radio does not get its fair share of advertising revenue, when compared to the amount of time people spend with the medium. A new study by eMarketer supports that theory. In 2014, adults over the age of 18, spent 12 percent of their time with radio and radio gets 9.3 percent of the ad share. Despite the fact that consumers are spending so little time with print these days, only 3.5 percent, print still gets a whopping 19 percent of the advertising pie. Consumers spend 37.3 percent of their media consumption watching TV which gets 41.2 percent of the ad pie. And, according to eMarketer, Americans are now spending 47.2 percent of their media consumption time with some type of digital device. That industry is already getting 30.5 percent of the ad pie, second to only television.

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I saw this and the survey misses the fact that there is more to buying advertising than the percentage of time people share with a medium. This report assumes all platforms are equal, and they're not. There's the price of the advertising, and one question radio people need to deal with is the multiple of CPM for radio vs digital. The other is how those spots are presented. Radio placement is different from print, digital, and TV. When an advertiser buys a spot on the radio, he gets :30 in a string of maybe 8 or more spots. That's like buying an 1/8 of a page print ad.

The information in this report is also a national average. My question would be are radio companies that combine their digital platform getting a bigger share than companies that are only selling OTA? My experience is that they probably are.