Pardon Me, But I Am Confused..

John Snyder, vice president, PPM Sales, Arbitron, just did what everyone says was a very impressive presentation yesterday in New York that makes it sound like we all need to have exciting play by play sports, or equally-compelling immediate events, on our radio stations in a People Meter world.

"The change from diary to PPM will impact everything from selling cycles to ratings to the ability to monetize special features,” he said. “In all likelihood, the ‘emotional’ sell of sports will be replaced with a more ‘fact-based’ sell, and this ‘estimate driven’ world should bring new advertisers to play-by-play who hadn’t considered it before. PPM opens the door to a whole
new level of understanding that wasn’t possible with the diary.”

Examples included in the presentation:

Talk show audiences increase after big wins or losses. While average cume audience (September to December 2005) to “Talk Football with David Carr” in Houston is about 8,700 persons age 6 and older. On the Monday after a close loss, the cume was 21,000 persons. On the Monday after a victory, it was even higher, at 25,600 persons 6+

World Cup Soccer recorded huge audiences on Spanish language Houston radio stations. While the May average cume for KEYH-AM/KXGJ-FM was just under 25,000 persons, audiences increased in June to over 153,000 during several World Cup broadcasts.

The NFL Draft proved a big draw on KILT-AM, particular when the Houston Texans surprised local fans. On Saturday, April 29 at exactly noon, the Houston Texans kicked off the 71st NFL Draft with a bang by passing up on Reggie Bush and selecting defensive end Mario Williams with the No. 1 pick. Audiences from the NFL Draft jumped from 12,600 cume at 10 A.M. to nearly 45,000 at noon the same day.

Radio ratings to sports events are directly related to the proportion of the audience that is out of home. Because of the impact of out of home audience on radio ratings, radio and TV audiences to the same sporting event tend to be complementary. As one medium declines, the other will tend to rise.

“With the PPM, we can see higher ratings and larger audiences during specific kinds of sports programming, especially during the afternoon and early evening, including the evening rush hour, when listeners aren’t near a television.”

Yeah, but how does the audience look on the average music radio station in the time period when we now get our highest rates? Hopefully, the presentation answering that question is coming pretty soon too.