A panel of 4,000 people has been recruited and are measured passively through Ipsos’ MediaCell technology which inserts an inaudible signal in programmes which automatically records all the sessions they listen to during the day via a smartphone app.

The company said unlike traditional “declarative” methods – where listeners are interviewed by telephone – the passive method no longer relies on the memory of listeners but records in real time.

Ipsos won an initial one-year contract last year after the closure of JIC (AudioRadio) and was asked to recruit a panel of 1,500 individuals to measure their listening to six national radio and 14 local stations that were encoding their content.

MediaCell is already in operation in the UK as well as Italy and the company plans to deploy the technology in ten countries this year across Europe, Central America, the Middle East and Asia.

Global development director at Ipsos MediaCT Jim Ford said: “The continued and increased support from the Italian radio market with MediaCell is really exciting. This project, coupled with the listening panel in London, which is funded by RAJAR, continues to build our Ipsos respondent focused approach to passive electronic broadcast audience measurement.”