• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, August 19, 2014

Jelli’s programmatic platform for broadcast radio advertising is growing, with the addition this week of seven new stations across the country, including major properties owned by Emmis Communications and Beasley Broadcast Group. In the latter case, these are the first Beasley stations to sign up for Jelli’s programmatic ad service.

The new stations signing up for Jelli’s RadioSpot platform include Emmis’ WBLS-FM in New York City and six Beasley stations: WJBR-FM in Philadelphia, WQAM-AM in Miami, KKLZ-FM, KOAS-FM, KVGS-FM, and KCYE-FM in Las Vegas. That brings the total number of radio stations across the U.S. using Jelli to over 400, reaching an aggregate audience of around 60 million people per week.

The announcement marks Jelli’s entry into the Miami and Las Vegas markets. In addition to Emmis and Beasley, the company already has deals with broadcasters, agencies, and online media buying platforms, including Townsquare Media, Entercom, Marketron, and OMD Worldwide.

Jelli launched RadioSpot in January of this year, and in March, the company announced the launch of SpotPlan, a Web-based programmatic buying platform for buying radio ads, which combines Nielsen data and proprietary algorithms to enable media buyers to run ads automatically nationwide.

Buyers can browse available inventory from stations and networks by location, audience and ratings to produce plans that optimize station lineup, daypart, impressions, GRPs and audience targets. SpotPlan is compatible with third-party buying and selling software from broadcasters, networks and advertisers.

Jelli’s programmatic platform for buying and serving broadcast radio ads is a second career for the company, which began as a user-controlled social radio platform.

Launched in 2009, this experimental service allowed listeners to control broadcast radio airplay via online voting, before finally going dark in June of this year, as the company focused its efforts on the programmatic platform.