THE RICH GETTING RICHER:  eMarketer is out with their latest forecast of US Mobile Ad Revenue by the major publishers.  The numbers that jump off the page, of course, and the lion’s share being devoured by Google and Facebook.  Google’s revenue percentage, which is derived mostly from Search and Display, was 31.5% in 2016 and is expected to grow to 33.8% by 2019.  Facebook, who generates revenue from Content and Video ads, took in 22.5% of the mobile ad revenue in 2016 and is expected to grow another 4% to 26.5% by 2019.  If this forecast is accurate over 60% of mobile revenue will be controlled by two players within the next three years (let that sink in).  Then there’s a pack of four – Yahoo/Twitter/Pandora/YP – all taking in 1-3% of mobile ad revenue.  Interestingly, of those four only Twitter is forecasted to see significant share erosion, with Pandora expected to pass them in rev share by 2019. The one dark horse on this list is Snapchat – sitting in the #7 position right now, but with lots of momentum but also growing client push back to prove ad effectiveness.  Should be interesting to see how this horse race shapes up over the next few years.  (link)

iHEART GETS CREATIVE WITH AUDIENCE SEGS:  Every year iHeart holds an upfront style gathering called SoundFront to debut upcoming product advancements.  During this week’s SoundFront they debuted a new capability called SmartAudio, which is effectively a DMP that allows matching by clients’ CRM data or other third party data to create custom audience segments.  The innovation wrinkle here is that iHeart is using declared data from the streaming listeners who have registered (a portion of their audience is registered), and then models out segment characteristics against their larger broadcast audience.  It’s a little bit of Frankenstein matching because they’re projecting a listener profile from one platform to another, but at least it’s a creative way to bring audience segmentation to the data-void broadcast side of their business.  (link)

NIELSEN IS BROKEN:  If there was ever any doubt about the problems with Nielsen’s PPM ratings system, consider the situation going on in Tampa right now.  One household in Tampa was given four people meters, which is one for every person in the home.  All family members dutifully wore there PPMs, and they all listened to a heavy amount of the online stream version of a Hispanic station owned by Beasley Broadcasting.  As a result of their listening volume, compared to the relatively small total # of PPMs in Tampa, the online station rose to #1 in the market within selected demos.  In reaction to this Nielsen deemed this household an “outlier whose behavior does not represent the marketplace”, and subsequently took the household’s listening out of Tampa’s ratings calculation.  Does this sound like a stable ratings measurement system to you?  The core problem is Nielsen’s unwillingness to update their measurement technology to something better than a device you might find at Beeper City.  Or at the very least, add significantly more PPMs to the market in order to stabilize the data.  I have two links on this from Inside Radio.  The first is a description of what’s occurred. (link1)  And the second is a radio consultant’s take on what Nielsen should do to fix their PPM problem. (link2)  Be sure to remember Tampa the next time you hear a radio rep use Nielsen data garbage to pitch their station.

Have a great Thursday guys!