DIGITAL DETHRONING KING TELEVISION: Digital has come to the television medium, and there’s little doubt that traditional TV is at a crossroads. For evidence of this check out the cause-and-effect occurring in this pair of AdAge articles. The first Cause . . . (link1) highlights the continued decline of the big four networks’ ratings. Over the last five years ABC/CBS/NBC/Fox have lost over a third of their ratings, and the viewership decline seems to be accelerating. Now the Effect . . . (link2) delves into NBCUniversal’s decision to invest $500M in Snap during last week’s IPO. This is NBC’s attempt to diversify by purchasing an up and coming video distribution system primarily used by the under 35 crowd. Up until now the thinking has always been “content is king”, but as NBC and the other networks are discovering these days you also need to have a digital platform to distribute your content on.

AUDIO AD WATERMARKING: In an interesting audio ad tech advancement, Kantar Media has been selected by a media association (which includes the ANA and 4As) to establish a standard audio ad watermarking protocol for the industry. For those not familiar, audio watermarking is an inaudible sound included within a station’s signal which can be picked up by people meters (PPMs) but not heard by humans – sort of think of this as a tracking pixel for radio. Since Arbitron (now Nielsen) launched the PPM technology in 2006 broadcasters have encoded watermarking in stations to receive listening credit when a PPM device comes within earshot of their station’s signal. But watermarking has only been used to track overall station listening up until now. With this new protocol Kantar will eventually be able to track listening down to specific commercials via a unique Ad-ID. Could this be a step towards an era of “audibility” for the audio industry? (link)

STORM CLOUDS GATHERING AT CRS: For those of you with a country radio background you might be familiar with the CRS, which is radio’s annual Country Radio Seminar in Nashville. It’s a typical industry confab for radio and label execs to interact and tell themselves how great one another is. I know this first hand because I used to be on the agenda committee in charge of planning content for CRS’s of yesteryear. Normally this event doesn’t draw many headlines unless you work in country music. But this year was different. There was a palpable vibe at CRS that radio, the legacy audio medium, is under assault from all angles including smart phones, connected home speakers, and even the driverless cars of tomorrow. Billboard tagged along during the entire CRS and took copious notes for the rest of us – link below. Seems like sobering times for an industry that’s hitting an inflection point. (link)

TOP DIGITAL STATS FROM THE PAST WEEK: And just because I missed you guys, here’s a little extra content in the form of AdWeek’s Top Digital Stats from the past week. Since I have a full time job I haven’t taken the time to zoom in on the syrup in that Denny’s post to see the hidden image, but apparently over 100,000 people have. Enjoy! (link)

Have a great Tuesday guys!