Things No One Takes Time To Explain

One of the best things about being a consultant is that I am invited to attend meetings under the guise of imparting my knowledge and experience which are invariably attended by smarter and more experienced people than I am. 

So, as the aphorism contends, to really learn a subject, teach it -- and as a result I learn some fun factoids every single day from the folks I get to mingle with.

Four recent examples, gleaned from PPM data in New York, Houston and Philadelphia but which apply to all of us right now):

1. Q:  Why is it that AC does so well each December, and why did it do especially well in Fall of 2007?

A:  The key to doing well in ratings 11 months a year is listening at work.  In diaries, on average, almost 75% of all average quarter hours (and in the PPM in spite of cumes literally doubling, it’s still 50%) come from P-1 heavy users, the people who listen for 100 quarter hours a week or even more.  Thus, under normal circumstances, the secret to doing well for country radio is targeting 25-54 non-ethnic individuals who work full time, at least 35 hours a week.  Fulltime employed men are the heaviest users of radio.  Women who are not employed fulltime tend to watch TV during the daytime hours and as a result listen to a lot less radio than the average radio user.  Given these realities, a successful AC station must get at least 60% of its average quarter hours from ‘at work’ listening.

As you hear from me repeatedly, a country station’s ideal profile is 33% of its AQH from at work, 33% from in car and 33% at home and other places.  Then, comes the three weeks before Christmas and many listeners take time off work so the place where the majority of AQH comes from changes radically.  Meanwhile, AC stations become the at home listening choice due to their solid Christmas music marketing and images.  That’s why, in PPM data, Arbitron has created a “13th month” which they call the Christmas book.  AQH shares (which are of course a percentage of the available AQH audience) literally double for the solid Christmas music stations (B-101 in Philadelpha, for example, has a 25.2% share of adult listening the week before Christmas in the Philadelphia PPM data and then goes back to to 10 share the week after the Holiday).  Then, the week after Christmas, they go right back down to normal levels immediately.

No doubt, this is also the case in diaries as well, but due to monthly averaging, AC radio carries that December bump into the first two monthlies of the next quarter.  It’s not because AC gets more listening in January and February as a result of the December at home AQH, it’s due to the monthly averages.  In the face of this reality, to have a good fall book knowing that many of your listeners won’t be at work for a week or two of the survey period which makes it very hard if not impossible to keep your percentage of AQH from at work up to the levels you maintain the rest of the year, a country station needs to have an aggressive strategy to do as well as possible in the workplace during the first and second phases of the fall Arbitron survey and then play enough of your listeners’ favorite Christmas songs they can’t hear anywhere else while also balancing that with their favorite current, recurrent and power gold hits and encouraging the core to listen to you at home more than normal during those weeks away from their normal workplace.  It’s a tricky balancing act because as research has shown for the last few years, about half of country’s heaviest users would love it if we played all Christmas music while the other half wouldn’t like that at all.

Next fall:  get as many average quarter hours from at work as you can in the first nine weeks of the ARB survey period and then work to keep your partisans listening to you while they prepare for Christmas at home.

2. Q:  Do email blasts work to improve my ratings?

A:  They sure do, IF they are relevant and topical, giving a benefit-driven reason to listen.  For example, sport-talk KILT-AM, Houston, sent an email blast to their database announcing that the general manager and manager of the Astros had just been fired and that they would be carrying the press conference that afternoon at 3 pm for the official announcement by the team owner live.  The following week, it was obvious from the PPM data that the station got a big hit in AQH and cume.  Email blasts which contain concert announcements and DJ news probably don’t impact listening at all and may actually hurt the impact of future ones as they lesson the open rate of future email blasts because they are all about the station and your advertisers.  Lead with a benefit to the reader, make sure the message is relevant and make an appointment to pay off with an entertaining or informative event and watch your email marketing grow your AQH by improving your cume recycling.

3. Q:  Do charity radiothons grow my audience?

A:  No.  In fact they cost you audience big-time in the short term.  This is a lesson from PPM markets which can be applied to every market where rating matter.  A Philadelphia station did a three day radiothon during the Fall ARB and saw its AQH audience literally cut in half the first day of the call for pledges and go down even lower in the second and third days.  This doesn’t mean that you need to stop doing radiothons, since they obviously have a positive impact on your brand, given that in spite of these real losses in listening levels during the event, the diary ratings show no loss in listening at all.  In other words, the PPM shows that as many as 50% of your audience changes stations while you beg for bucks, but the diary shows that the sample understands that this is a nice thing for you to do so they don’t punish you for doing it by writing less listening in their books.  Recommendation:  rethink the way t do Radiothons.  Look at our your local public broadcasters do their fund-raising, promising to stop the drive the instant they hit their goal.  Cut the length of your radiothon in half and double the sense of urgency during the drive for dollars, letting the audience know how limited the time is to reach the goal.  One station in the City Of Brotherly Love tried this and raised more money than they did in the last three day radiothon in just over a day and a half.  Also:  place your radiothons at a time of year when they won’t do ratings damage and will give your normal audience to return, for example the week between Christmas and New Years.

4. Q:  We have metrics on the flow of our streaming audio audience showing the levels of online listening to the station.  Can I use this data to learn about my rated listening as well?

A:  You bet you can.  Streaming metrics of numerous stations in all three PPM markets have been overlayed with the actual audience behavior as measured by the PPM and the matchup is uncannily similar.  So, if you want to know if a specific repetitive and irritating commercial, a new song, or a special event (play-by-play on a music FM) is costing you real audience, just look at your streaming statistics.  If you want to know if a contest or prize is working to improve your cume or moving your excisting cume to new listening appointments, check your stream data.  Portable People Meter audience flow numbers tend to look very much like it.