Miller Kaplan Arase

Broadcasters, and only broadcasters, plus the industry associations they fund. Miller Kaplan supports more than 2,800 media properties and is the largest supplier of precise market revenue reporting to both radio and television, working across roughly 180 markets. Its clients also include newspapers, cable interconnects and out-of-home companies.

Inside a station the readers are the general manager, the general sales manager, and any seller allowed to see the X-Ray detail. The Radio Advertising Bureau's quarterly revenue releases are built on the Miller Kaplan pool, so its numbers reach the whole industry secondhand.

To settle the question of who actually got the money. Four products do the work:

• Market Revenue — enter and view top-line market share and revenue growth.
• X-Ray — market share and revenue growth by individual advertiser.
• X-Ray ADvantage — a quarterly list of 25 advertisers with the greatest potential revenue benefit to your station.
• Cross Media Revenue — a top-line view across media types where enough participants report.

The firm's wider media practice handles financial statement audits and the industry-specific accounting problems that come with it, including true broadcast cash flow and the treatment of digital revenue streams.

From the stations themselves. Participating broadcasters submit their own booked revenue — local, national, digital, off-air and non-traditional — through a web-based data entry platform. Miller Kaplan aggregates it under accountant's confidentiality and returns share reports in which no single competitor's individual figure is exposed.

This is the crucial distinction in this whole section: Miller Kaplan does not estimate, model, monitor or survey. It counts what its participants report. The tradeoff is that the pool is only as complete as participation in a given market.

Reporting is monthly and close behind the book. A month's figures are typically available within weeks of close, which makes this the most current hard revenue data any local seller can get. Quarterly and year-to-date rollups follow.

It goes stale in a specific and dangerous way: if a significant competitor leaves the pool or a new entrant never joins, the market total shifts without the market actually changing. Read a sudden share swing as a possible participation change before treating it as a competitive event.

Because a forecast is not a receipt. Borrell and BIA tell you what could be spent. Miller Kaplan tells you what was. When a group reports its performance against the market — the phrasing that shows up in public broadcaster filings and investor decks as Miller Kaplan outperformance — this is the yardstick being used.

X-Ray is the piece with the most direct sales value. Seeing your share of an individual advertiser's local radio spend turns a vague sense that an account is underweighted into a defensible number, and X-Ray ADvantage does that arithmetic for you every quarter and hands back a target list.

• Market Revenue — monthly, shortly after each month closes.
• X-Ray — on the same monthly cycle where the market participates.
• X-Ray ADvantage — quarterly.
• RAB revenue releases — quarterly, derived from the pool and extrapolated nationally.

Participants enter revenue against a standard chart of categories so that everyone is counting the same things — which is why an accounting firm rather than a research firm holds the contract. Miller Kaplan reconciles submissions, applies its category definitions, aggregates to market level, and publishes each participant's share of the pooled total.

For national reporting, results from the reporting markets are extrapolated to the whole country. RAB's releases have historically carried the caveat directly: dollar amounts extrapolated from the X-Ray market pool may not be fully indicative of industry results as a whole.