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Jaye Albright, Associate Country Consultant, McVay Media
Jaye Albright is a partner with her longtime business associate Michael O'Malley in country radio's #2 ("we try harder," she promises) consultancy, Albright & O'Malley.
One of radio's most-honored consultants of 2003, she was named Billboard/Airplay Monitor's Country Radio Consultant/Group PD of the Year and also was honored by Radio Ink Magazine as one of the Most Influential Women in Radio. She is also a member of the Nevada Broadcasters Hall of Fame.
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...And, if you took the late 60's advice of Katherine Ross' father , offered in "The Graduate" to Dustin Hoffman, you no doubt made a fortune in "plastics."
If, like me, you shrugged and asked yourself 'what's he talking about?' your lack of intellectual curiosity may have cost you money back then.
Well, here is another chance for you to get on board another band wagon.
Even better, this one doesn't require a career change to take advantage of. It's a ratings-building tactic that'll help you get a jump on your competition. But, you can only do it IF you've been building, maintaining, growing and mailing/phoning an active listener (NOT LIMITED ONLY TO CONTEST WINNERS!) data base of 'research responsive' households as we have been encouraging clients in all size markets to do for more than a decade.
OK. You've got the data base started. What now?
I have only three words for you: "postal cell analysis."
If you are planning to do direct mail and/or telemarketing in the next survey, ask your list supplier or printer to do a postal cell qualitative (Claritas/Prizm/PDAdvantage) analysis of that database of yours and start mailing to lists NOT JUST FROM HOT ZIPS BUT FROM YOUR HOT POSTAL CELLS within those hot zips as demonstrated by listening patterns in your listener database.
Arbitron has been "block coding" their data since the fall of 2004. In fact, because of the sample size of Arbitron in most hot zips, using ARB diaries to try to locate the hottest postal cells within your hot zip areas will take three or four rating periods.
Tip: one little report in PD Advantage almost makes the added cost of the analysis program worth it all by itself. In Maximiser/Progammer's Package you can generate a list of the zip codes where you and your competition got the most diaries (cume). We've all been doing that, of course, for many years. And, it is a terrifc way to improve the efficiency of your marketing efforts, from billboard locations to thousand blocks where country radio fans tend to live. BUT, the 'killer app' in PDA is the ability to rank postal codes by AQH. That way, you can even find the postal codes which tend to contribute more 100+ QH heavy user diaries to you and your competition. A very effective stealth tactic: direct market to the locations where your competition's heaviest users live and work at least one time, if not more often, in each monthly phase of each ARB or BBM survey.
THAT is state of the art "postal code analysis."
Your data base is probably five, ten, fifteen or more times larger than the entire ARB sample right now, making it a much more accurate source of this statistical information than tracking hot zips from one diary review.
Even better, these are ALL your (and hopefully your competition's) listeners. So, since there is no waste, there is a very high likelihood that the folks who live in the same postal cells as the majority of the names and addresses in your data base are excellent prospects for conversion marketing.
Since they probably know that most of their neighbors are already listening to your station and since they share much of the same lifestyle patterns, they'll probably be quite responsive when you give them a solid reason to do so as well by mail or by phone.
A single hit zip code may contain 40,000 or more addresses. But, after studying the hottest postal cells represented in your database, you may find that there are specific areas within such a zip code where a mailing of fewer than 10,000 homes could have the same (or better) impact as a full market mailer.
Even when block code information becomes available, postal cell information that you can develop now from your own in-house database will most likely still be more useful and accurate! So, what are you waiting for?
In one situation A&O knows about this past Spring where the technique of carefully cloning a list of prospects for a direct mail campaign was born out of the hottest postal cells in the station's active listener data base, average quarter hours have soared in the first two trends of the survey.
This was accomplished with a mailing of only 100,000 homes located in key postal cells of the station within this metro area of nearly 4,000,000 people. More amazingly, the response rate of this direct mail piece (aside from affecting the station's ratings very positively) was 22%!
After mailing just 100,000 households, this station added 22,000 names to its database in only eight weeks.
Of course, now that they have increased the size of that original database, the next "postal cell analysis" they perform on their database for their next direct mail or telemarketing blitz will be even more accurate in pinpointing and targeting ONLY the areas where they have the very best prospects for building cume and TSL.
That's why it will be hard for latecomers to database marketing to catch up to the pioneers who managed to learn the postal cells where their station is hot, so that they could start building a relationship with those prospects right now..
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