By Charles Lee Mathews. Radio is under pressure to prove business results while relying on audience data that is now years out of date.
For Andile Kona, managing director, MediaMix 360, radio’s biggest challenge is proving commercial results: “Proof of outcome,” says Kona. “Even directional proof: attributable calls, store visits, promo-code redemptions, or a documented brand-lift study,” Kona says.
Stations are now competing with channels that provide real-time dashboards rather than audience estimates, Kona says, which makes independent measurement and verification more important than ever. For MediaMix 360, the bottom line is that audio must earn its place by showing it contributes to real business growth.
“To clients, what matters is reaching the right audience with measurable outcomes,” says Kona. “In South Africa, we are still buying radio as a mass medium. Programmatic audio has improved targeting, particularly on streaming platforms, but traditional radio has yet to fully unlock audience precision,” he says.
Kona argues that stations should stop selling airtime and instead sell audience segments. “The real opportunity for a station rep isn’t just better data; it’s reframing radio’s actual comparative advantage: it’s still the cheapest way to build broad reach and frequency fast, and in a world where digital CPMs keep climbing,” he notes.
No proper data in four years
Chris Botha, group managing director, Park Advertising, says what media agencies want is valid data. “It is seriously worrying how old the current RAMS data is that we are dealing with. It means that audience numbers really are suggestive. We haven’t had proper data in nearly four years, and it is compromising the media,” he says.
“I know the BRC (The Broadcast Research Council of South Africa) is working actively on changing this. I am very excited to see the new data when it does come out. Then we can really see where relative pricing for Radio sits,” Botha says.
“Radio/Audio is still a great platform and delivers massive audiences. Let’s not kid around; the platform is critical to us. I think the targetability that comes with audio, and specifically programmatic, is helpful and handy, but I don’t think this is necessarily what clients are rushing after. Radio is a mass reach medium first and foremost. The fact that we can hyper-target is cool, but not the USP of the medium. Radio should never lose its soul. Its scale is what continues to drive it,” he says.
“Packaged buying of Radio has to grow. I actually don’t care what station I am reaching the consumer on — but care more about what consumer I am reaching, and at what cost and scale,” says Botha, who adds that the future of how media agencies buy the medium is Performance Radio “with guaranteed audiences at scale.”
Competing in a broader audio economy
Kevin Ndinguri, chief investment officer, Publicis Groupe Africa, believes that radio needs to be cognisant of context. “Audio is no longer a single-medium conversation. Radio is now competing with Spotify, YouTube Music, podcasts, streaming radio, social video platforms and other digital environments that are all fighting for listening time,” he says.
“Many traditional broadcasters are no longer behaving only as radio stations. They are extending into streaming, podcasts, on-demand content and digital distribution because they understand that they are now competing in a broader audio economy, and that has major implications for planning,” Ndinguri adds.
For Ndinguri, the real question isn’t whether to buy radio at all, it’s who you’re trying to reach and how audio fits into their day. “Capabilities such as Connected Identity and platforms like Lotame help us move beyond broad demographic assumptions and look at observed behaviours, media habits, interests and intent signals across multiple environments,” he says.
Younger consumers, he adds, do not experience audio in neat media-owner categories. “A 25-year-old may listen to a breakfast show in the morning, stream music during work, catch a podcast in traffic and engage with audio-led content through social platforms in the evening. To them, that is not “radio versus digital audio”. It is simply audio,” Ndinguri says.
The point he makes is that people don’t live in channel definitions. “They move between audio environments based on context, mood, convenience and content,” says Ndinguri. “They may listen to a live radio show in the car, continue with that station through a digital stream, switch to a podcast later in the day and then listen to a playlist while exercising or working. Younger audiences in particular are completely platform agnostic. They care about relevance, access, personality, content and control.”
Connecting the audio ecosystem
For Ndinguri, the next step is measuring audio as consumers actually experience it. “At the moment, the industry often measures broadcast radio, streaming audio, podcasts and digital audio environments separately. That might make sense from a media-owner perspective, but it does not reflect how people actually consume audio,” Ndinguri says.
Locally, radio’s strength has been its ability to connect communities. “Presenters are not just voices; in many cases, they are cultural figures, trusted companions and local influencers. That is not easy for global platforms to replicate. The most successful traditional broadcasters will be those that stop defining themselves narrowly as radio stations,” he says.
“The future of audio in South Africa is not going to be built around a fight between radio and digital audio. The real opportunity is to build a connected audio ecosystem that combines radio’s scale and cultural relevance with digital audio’s precision and podcasting’s depth of engagement,” Ndinguri says.
The media owners agree. “Every medium needs to provide evidence of the value it creates beyond audience numbers,” says Melissa McNally, research and analytics manager of Kagiso Connect SoundInsights.
“For radio, accountability is about showing what happened because a campaign ran. Did it improve brand consideration? Drive website visits, store traffic, enquiries or sales? As an industry, we’ve made significant progress through attribution, first-party data and richer audience intelligence, giving advertisers a far clearer understanding of radio’s contribution to business results,” McNally says.
She argues that measurement should strengthen, not replace reach by showing the commercial impact that follows exposure. “Reach tells us who we can influence; accountability demonstrates the impact of that influence. Together, they make a far more compelling case for radio’s role in the modern media mix,” she says, adding: “The biggest opportunity is to package radio around outcomes rather than inventory.”
Radio stations vs audio brands
“Radio needs to stop playing defence against digital. It’s not a competitor to fear; it’s a partner to build with,” says Malani van Huyssteen, commercial manager at East Coast Radio. She says that the winners will be stations that “stop thinking of themselves as radio stations and start thinking of themselves as audio brands — broadcast, streaming, podcasts, social, data, all working as one offer.”
“Innovation in media is consistently hampered by legacy business models that see campaigns booked across different channels by different teams in differing ways, or by approaches to marketing that prioritise planning against KPI’s that are upstream of the actual sales objectives of the client,” says Nick Grubb, CEO of Kagiso Connect.
“As a media industry, we need to provide marketers with trustworthy measurement, faultless execution and creatively brilliant ideas, based on a real understanding of our communities, and likewise marketers need to support and develop a better media industry by recognising where real connection exists beyond superficial consumption metrics, and by supporting media owners who invest in trustworthy and quality-assured content,” Grubb says.
The striking thing about these answers is how little the two sides disagree. Buyers and sellers arrive at the same request from opposite directions: stop selling slots, start selling audiences and outcomes.
Charles Lee Mathews is a senior editor to MarkLives MEDIA and a senior writer to MarkLives.com, as well as co-founder of The Writers, a writing consultancy.
