Triton Digital will measure Pandora's national and local audience using the more-traditional AQH and cume metrics as part of their new MRC-accredited Triton Webcast Metrics Local report, the companies announced in a joint press release this morning. Triton also released local Pandora audience ratings for March 2012.

The ratings show Pandora with an AQH rating of 1.0-1.2 for nearly all of the markets among A18-34s. Among A18-49s, the company's rating falls between 0.7 and 0.9. Pandora's cume ratings range between 22 and nearly 29 among A18-34s (the top market being San Francisco with a cume rating of 28.7), while among A18-49s the cume rating falls between 15 and nearly 21.

In a typical major market Arbitron report, in a demo like A18-34, the top-rated broadcast station might have about a 0.7 AQH rating (which would equate to about a 9.0 share in the demo).

Pandora writes in its press release: "The national results for March 2012 show that among adults 18-49 Pandora has a weekly cume of 23,874,175, which is equivalent to a cume rating of 17.8 and, when compared to radio networks in Arbitron's March 2012 RADAR 112 report, makes Pandora the largest adult 18-49 radio network in the U.S."

Pandora CRO John Trimble commented, "The new Triton reports are a great step forward for the radio industry and satisfy the growing demand for an apples-to-apples, third-party measurement solution for terrestrial and Internet radio."

You can find the companies' press release here and the March report for Pandora here (PDF).

RAIN ANALYSIS: Triton's ratings show Pandora continuing its AQH growth among A18-49 from the figures released in December 2011 by Edison Research and Pandora (see the charts below). The ratings suggest that Pandora is the #1 consumer brand of radio in almost every one of the top 10 markets, (in the sense that 'Kiss 109' is a consumer brand but 'Clear Channel' or 'Cumulus' are not).

Here's a fun sign of the times: a Pandora listener, Kyle Taylor, aired an "ultra-targeted" ad to his girlfriend of 6 years recently. It was a marriage proposal, and his girlfriend heard the custom ad in her Hyundai Veloster (which has Pandora built-in to the dashboard). 

"I started to work with the team at Pandora and they told me this has never been done before, so they would be more than happy to help," wrotes Taylor at his blog. "After working with the creative and technical teams to figure out the best medium, getting passed to their audio advertising team to get a script together and recorded by an awesome voice actress, and once it was finalized it went back to ad trafficking to test out my ad and see if it worked. Of course, it worked out perfectly." 

In more ways than one: she said yes.

However, Taylor apparently had to do some demographic manipulating to get this to work. Pandora targeted the ad to "very old listeners" in a "sparsely populated zip code." Taylor then entered some fake demographic info into Pandora to hear the ad. That way, it was "very, very unlikely" any other listeners heard the very personal ad, according to CTO Tom Conrad.

Still, an interesting and creative use of the powerful targeting abilities of Internet radio. TechCrunch has more coverage here.

ESPN.com will license technology from startup RealVu to enable their advertisers to track whether a display ad actually appears on a user’s screen (rather than "below the fold" when a site viewer fails to scroll down).

"As part of the new pact, several test campaigns for (ad agency) Horizon clients will roll out this this month employing RealVu's technology, theoretically ensuring that only viewable impressions will be delivered," writes AdWeek. 

The ad industry is encouraging publishers to abandon the practice of tallying simple ad "impressions" (which may not ever even be seen), and instead track the number of ads that are "rendered" -- that is, displayed on a screen.

In 2010 MSNBC.com redesigned its site to "completely eliminate the possibility of below-the-fold impressions." AdWeek reports ESPN is considering a similar move.

Read more from AdWeek here.

Tomorrow Arbitron will host a webinar about adding "gamification" offerings to Internet radio. Gamification "incorporates game elements and mechanics into non-game websites and apps," explains Arbitron. Some examples are frequent flyer programers, Foursquare badges and eBay "stars."

"Every business (especially radio) can use gamification techniques to increase online and social media visits, engagement and retention," says Arbitron.

The webinar will feature Bunchball, a leader in gamification. You can find out more and register for the webinar here.