By Clint Gearheart, Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer Radio delivered a stunning 17-to-1 return on investment for four department store chains during the third quarter of 2014, according to new research from Nielsen. The new hot-off-the-presses study, previewed Wednesday at the NAB-RAB Radio Show in Atlanta, also showed the radio campaigns drove a 10% increase in overall store sales for the four retail brands. The study, which compared consumer spending at the department stores in Q3 of 2014 to the same period in 2013, showed exposure to the radio campaigns drove a 10% lift in overall store sales with radio bringing in more shoppers who also spent more often each time they shopped. The study credits the radio campaigns with a 3% increase in the total number of buyers and a 6% increase in dollars spent per buyer. Sizing up the total impact of the campaigns, Carol Edwards, senior VP, Nielsen Media Analytics, said they delivered incremental spending of $356 million from customers exposed to the messaging. Factoring in the $20 million the brands spent on the radio buy results in the 17-to-1 ROI metric, meaning that $17 in incremental store sales was generated for every dollar spent on radio. The latest in a series of radio ROI studies from Nielsen, the research cross-referenced time-stamped PPM listening data with Media Monitors spot tracking data to determine which listeners were exposed to the ads. Nielsen tapped its credit and debit card expenditure data to track the participants’ department store purchases and calculated the brands’ radio ad spend with SQAD data