Towards a “Shazam” for radio

The Walloon SME NeuroMedia launches a novel tool for measuring radio and TV audiences

27 January 2021

Advertisers remain wary about podcasts. The great ambiguity around the certification of audiences is an issue.
A start-up specialised in measuring audiences, NeuroMedia launches MetriCrowd.
MetriCrowd captures and recognises a station listened to (FM or web), and also TV channels and programmes watched, regardless of whether they are consumed live or in podcast mode.
The market now has a measuring system that is accessible, valid and capable of guaranteeing audience figures, both for radio and TV. The application can be a complement to the subjective data collected by panels through standard declarative techniques.On 22 January, MetriCrowd received the RedTech Award from Radio Week in the “Advertising and Monetization” category.

You are no doubt familiar with Shazam, the app that recognizes any song in a matter of seconds. NeuroMedia’s new app works on the same principle, but applied to radio stations or TV channels.

“Thanks to MetriCrowd, the sound environment is captured by a smartphone microphone. The signal is directly translated into a digital signature that is then sent to our identification service, which identifies the radio or TV station that is broadcasting live at the time of listening”, explains Pierre Mengal, co-founder of NeuroMedia.

It is easy to see the interest of this. Audience figures for large radio and TV stations are currently calculated on the basis of notes taken by a panel. Either the people on the panel are interviewers conducting physical interviews (out of the question in these times of Covid) or they fill in listening logs by hand or online. As a result, the disparity vis-à-vis reality can sometimes be quite considerable, especially for stations listened to for short periods of time or in a non-recurring way. For digital broadcasts, the measurements are complemented by logs and downloads, although nothing guarantees that a downloaded podcast is really listened to, nor for how long.

The MetriCrowd mobile app gets around this difficulty and makes the collection of audience figures objective and transparent, while facilitating the panel’s work. MetriCrowd picks up all the listeners who might be currently omitted in the panels’ figures.

The RedTech Award

On 22 January MetriCrowd received the RedTech Award from Radio Week in the “Advertising and Monetization” category. This event is held every year in Paris, sponsored by La Lettre Pro de la Radio and RedTech Tribe, the international professional community of radio and audio industries.

“This prize confirms the sector’s interest in our global vision of audience measurement”, points out Dany Donnen, the other co-founder of NeuroMedia. “The audio market, especially the podcast, is growing fast. It is a factor that needs to be recognized. The downside is that there are too many measurement methods. We in NeuroMedia are convinced that there are simple audience measurement solutions available which provide fair comparisons that are accessible to all producers.”

Would you like to try out MetriCrowd ?

The aim is to try out MetriCrowd in a real environment and participate in the co-construction of the tool, as it is complementary. If you are a sector professional (radio station, podcast, TV broadcaster), please contact us.

About us

NeuroMedia - www.neuromedia.io: founded in 2014, NeuroMedia is a company that specializes in data analysis for the media and entertainment sector (video games, social networks, streaming…) for more than 500 clients worldwide. In Belgium, NeuroMedia has the CIM (Information Centre on Media) and RTBF (on-line and Auvio [series and programme podcasts]) among its clients. Its 9-strong team is based in Liège.