Award-winning presentation at this year’s International Radio & Audio Conference in Venice

Andrea Mezzasalma of dataBreeders presenting Yvette van den Berg of NMO and Jerome Schalkwijk of Ipsos with the Tony Twyman Award for best paper at the 2024 asi International Radio & Audio Conference. Photograph by Vito Poma Foto.

In 2023, the new Dutch audio currency NMO Listening was introduced to the market. This represented a big change in methodology from e-diary to passive electronic measurement using the MediaCell+ app on a smartphone. It brought more granular weekly data, which prompted agencies and advertisers to invest more in radio (+9% in 2023).

In 2024, NMO took the next step in further developing the audio currency, and watermarking technology was added to audio-matching in the official audio figures. This ‘best of both worlds’ solution provides stakeholders with detailed (passive-measurement-driven) insight in consumption by platform, allowing accurate measurement of listeners’ transition from FM to DAB/IP. In addition, watermarking helped to remove all ambiguity around simulcast radio/TV broadcasts and has added on average 8% of listening time to what was already captured by audio-matching alone.

In their presentation at the 2024 asi International Radio & Audio Conference in Venice, Yvette van den Berg of NMO (Nationaal Media Onderzoek) and Jerome Schalkwijk of Ipsos compared the two techniques and showed that combining different measurement technologies delivers the best results for the industry.

Yvette and Jerome won this year’s prestigious Tony Twyman Award for best paper at the asi Radio & Audio Conference, kindly sponsored by dataBreeders. This is the second year in succession for NMO, having also won the award in 2023, and it’s the first time in the award’s history that the same company has won it in successive years.

You can view Yvette and Jerome’s presentation here: