By Eric Leo Blais

When Joty Pannu took the helm of Sauga 960 AM in 2018 as general manager, she faced quite the set of challenges. On the audience-building front, traditional radio (specifically AM radio) was not the first, second or third choice of younger audiences who prefer streaming audio platforms. On the revenue front, Sauga competes for ad budget share in the Peel Region, a suburb of Toronto, where over 60 AM and FM stations cover the dial.

Pannu believed there was a unique niche for Sauga within the market. Local stories were not being told and Peel Region voices were not being heard, so she assembled a capable team of media vets, including former CBC Director of Marketing Praveen Amirtharaj, and got to work.

Sauga embarked on delivering an original programming slate mirroring the market's broad cultural diversity. In a vast area encompassing Brampton, Caledon and Mississauga, Peel Region's 1.4 million residents (at last census) speak Punjabi, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Portuguese, Urdu and Tamil along with English and French. The station's unifying English-language schedule therefore delivers an eclectic and dynamic slate of talk radio ranging from politics, sports, lifestyle and current affairs to give voice to the diverse communities.

To prove the station's worth and understand the impact of its programming choices, Pannu's team had to measure the audience, and found that traditional broadcast-audience measurement methods were not up to the task. Seeking alternatives, they heard about StatsRadio, a start-up in Quebec City that had designed, developed and successfully implemented an agile radio-audience measurement method that crossed platforms (online and offline) and provided clients with valuable web analytics.

Data is captured daily and available to clients overnight. The analytics platform calculates campaign impressions and CPM so that savvy cross-platform marketers can track their entire multi-media advertising campaigns.

Pannu and her team took a leap of faith and gave StatsRadio a trial run. As a result, armed with robust information the station was able to show local advertisers who Sauga was reaching and also learned how it could grow that audience through real-time-data informed programming moves.

Concurrently, the Mississauga Steelheads had an audience problem of its own: how to increase the Ontario Hockey League team's popularity and draw larger crowds to the arena. Sauga and the Steelheads formed a strategic partnership, and the station began airing the team's home and away games live. The result was both increased their audiences overnight.

With the help of StatsRadio, the station was able to provide compelling audience numbers to the hockey club's owner and president, J. Elliott Kerr. To quote Amirtharaj, "he was blown away," and for the first time, the Mississauga Steelheads could directly attribute audience growth to radio's performance. Even when live attendance lagged, radio listenership continued to exceed expectations, and the team's management could accurately calculate the return of their media investment.

Sauga 960 AM continues to do the smart work required to sustain, grow and monetize a successful radio station. Using StatsRadio, Pannu's team is able to hone the programming slate, overnight if need be, by observing daily audience changes. Prompt cross-platform data and analysis also helps to empirically prove Sauga's value proposition to advertisers and agencies, as both sides of the business improve with the aid of dynamic data.

Eric Leo Blais is the director of content and client success at Statsadio. For more info on StatsRadio visit www.statsradio.com.