Country Stations In The Top 15 Markets Average 9.72 Minutes Of Commercials Per Hour

Empower MediaMarketing has conducted an analysis of radio advertising clutter in 15 markets, identifying the most and least cluttered locales and station formats. Empower’s analysis of Nielsen Monitor Plus data from the nation’s top 14 markets plus the agency’s home market of Cincinnati revealed that the most cluttered formats were news/talk (11.91 commercial minutes per hour) and sports (11.47). Country is the 4th most cluttered format.

“What’s interesting to us is that there is a perception of radio as being a very cluttered medium, yet the average number of commercial minutes per hour is less than that of television, which averages 12-14 minutes, and radio’s environment is less cluttered than, say, magazines, whose pages typically are about 50 percent advertising,” said Julie Pahutski, senior vice president, research, Empower MediaMarketing. “Our belief as an agency is that radio is generally undervalued, particularly by national advertisers.”