Audio ads, as well as a lot of other forms of advertising, such as billboards, signs, posters, print advertising and other traditional forms of advertising are all characterized by the difficulty, or rather inability to measure how well the ad is performing in actually attracting the attention of the audience. There is no real way of saying how many people walking past a certain point or browsing through the pages of some magazine actually see the prominently placed, and well paid for advertisement. It is just infeasible.

Audio ads are even harder to measure, as the message getting heard is dependent on a number of factors:

• environment-related factors, such as traffic and general ambient noise,
• the hearing ability of each member of the audience,
• headphones which are a growing trend especially for target groups such as commuters, people travelling alone, and young people in general,

This is a known and common problem in the field, and there are many people out there struggling to find a solution. The latest comes from this article though:

Many companies are trying to solve this issue, and one called Integrated Media Measurement is using mobile to do it. Via chips embedded in cell phones, they hope to measure a person’s exposure to audio ads anywhere they go. The premise: what a person hears, their phone hears.

Here’s how it works: The software picks up audio and converts it into a digital code, which is then sent to the IMMI database. The database scans the code for media content such as TV, commercial, song, movie, etc. Most importantly, it attempts to measure the effectiveness of an ad by determining whether a person actually goes and views the advertised content. This software is currently only embedded into the cell phones of the company’s 4,900 panelists between the ages of 13 and 54. While it’s limited to ads you can hear at the moment, thus lending itself to entertainment, IMMI has hopes to expand to consumer products and is currently working with a national grocery store chain.

I cannot deny that the approach sounds promising and indeed offers a solution to the problem. However, there are a number of problems with this approach, with privacy definitely at the top of the list. I have come across a number of studies in the past, that revealed that people are more reluctant to being audio rather than video-recorded. In addition, I imagine there must be some way of turning the thing off, cause there are obviously certain places you don't want it recording you.

Still, even if privacy is overcome though, it is certainly not a straightforward assumption that anything the device can 'hear' its owner will as well. I mean it's done thing saying that sound reaches your ear and another you hearing it, let alone the message getting through to you. Add to that the fact that devices are often tucked away in deep pockets under several layers of clothing (depending on how cold the climate of the country is -- e.g. here in Greece that wouldn't be too much of a problem, but imagine Sweden) , in bags, and in general places where sound is obstructed, and you have a big fat real-world problem that compromises the soundness of your results.

I would be interested to find out how it goes though, and the results from longitudinal usage of their product, to see how well (and if) it actually works.