Cardigan Audio was built by Jason Kibby. He spent 30 years in broadcast radio before spending 26 years as a chief information officer in the biotech industry. He came back to radio because he saw a problem that had not been solved.
Nielsen tracks the largest markets. If you run a station in a market with fewer than a few hundred thousand people, you basically do not exist in Nielsen's data. You are trying to sell advertising with nothing more than estimated reach from Arbitron diaries that are decades old, if you have any data at all.
Cardigan solves that. We use FCC signal contours, census tract data, and actual engagement tracking to show stations what their audiences actually look like. Not sampled, not modeled, not inferred from diaries. Real data about real people in real places.
We build products that help small and medium market stations sell advertising more effectively, engage their listeners more deeply, and prove their worth to buyers who have been conditioned to demand ratings data that simply does not exist for their markets.
Seven products. One subscription. All of them designed to help stations compete in markets that the legacy rating systems abandoned.
Radio is not dying. But the way the industry measures it has not kept up with the reality of how people listen. Cardigan exists to give stations the tools they need to demonstrate their actual value, not just the value that fits inside a Nielsen diary.