Nielsen has announced that Westwood One has selected Nielsen Marketing Cloud and its advanced data management platform (Nielsen DMP) to launch the first-ever audio DMP. This ushers in an era of highly specific radio audience targeting. Advertisers can now make sharper buying decisions across Westwood One’s over-the-air radio and streaming audio channels, which reach almost a quarter of a billion listeners weekly across all U.S. media markets.

Nielsen Marketing Cloud’s unique consumer insights capabilities enable Westwood One to easily provide its advertisers with detailed reports indexing all of its network station lineups, key programming (NFL and NCAA) and radio formats (such as ‘Alternative Rock,’ ‘Mainstream Country,’ or ‘News/Talk’) against their prospective customers’ demographics, personalities, TV viewing habits, digital behavior, credit card spending and specific product purchases.

“Purchase-based marketing is now a long-awaited reality for our advertisers, and proudly a first-mover advantage for Westwood One,” said Suzanne Grimes, EVP, Corporate Marketing, Cumulus Media, and President, Westwood One. “Radio now offers specificity of audience alongside the biggest reach in media. We are embracing Nielsen’s big data capabilities to enable our advertisers to identify and reach their best customers across every radio format we offer at an extremely high degree of accuracy.”

Nielsen Marketing Cloud connects Westwood One’s radio formats to real offline purchase data. The Nielsen DMP does this by linking Westwood One audience data captured via Nielsen’s Portable People Meter (PPM) and Westwood One’s proprietary streaming audio data with a wide spectrum of other Nielsen data assets in real time. This includes Nielsen Catalina Solutions’ consumer packaged goods (CPG) purchase data, the largest source of UPC-level sales data in the U.S., covering 121,000 brands and 184 million individuals. It also includes Nielsen Buyer Insights purchase data, covering $1.2 billion in consumer spending across 125 million U.S. credit cardholders.

“Never before have radio audiences been linked to such a rich source of actual purchase data across industries—something Nielsen is uniquely equipped to do,” said Damian Garbaccio, EVP, Commercial – Nielsen Marketing Cloud. “The Nielsen DMP has the data, analytics and reporting advertisers need to understand and act on incredibly deep consumer insights. This enables Westwood One to better demonstrate just how important its audience is and to win more advertising dollars in a very competitive cross-media marketing environment.”

Nielsen Marketing Cloud empowers brands, agencies and media companies to connect more deeply with customers by combining Nielsen’s world-class audience data, media planning, marketing activation, analytics and data management platform capabilities in a fully-integrated platform.

Nielsen is committed to consumer privacy, making consumers aware of how their data is being used, and providing the ability to opt-out of targeted advertising at any time through settings on the content providers’ site.