Thursday, February 16, 2012

36% Of 25-54 Country Radio Listeners Live In Cell Phone Only Homes

Top line findings from Albright & O'Malley's 7th Annual "Roadmap 2012" country format perceptual will be presented Tuesday, February 21, at our annual client seminar, but just one stat from the huge sample from 94 country stations (28% of them from all across Canada and 72% listeners to A&O's American country client stations) points to why in spite of their very positive financial results, reported yesterday, Arbitron (and Canada's BBM too) is having less positive results when it comes to delivering a consistent, quality sample.

The 25-54 composition of the 2012 A&O country format P-1 study is 27% 25-34, 31% 35-44 and 42% 45-54.

This year's country 25-54 CPO percentage is actually down slightly from last year's figure, which was 40%.

4 comments:

Stats Geek said...

Just an educated guess, of course, but I'd bet that the 7.5% increase in landline households this year over last may have come from the state of the economy as more under-35 year olds (especially singles) have moved back to their parents' homes. That actually could hurt the proportionality of the sample, since larger than average households help the ratings companies hit their targets while including fewer different households in the sample which tends to over-represent the kind of folks who live in big households and under-represent the more "average" ones.

Doug Burton RadioTraks LLC said...

Thank you for sharing the A&O cell phone numbers in yesterday’s blog.  I thought you might be interested to learn your numbers also match RadioTraks own national polling with Country P-1’s 25-54.

By our numbers, there was a significant jump in penetration near the end of 1st QTR into 2nd QTR 2011.  I had found this interesting in that cell only numbers hovered at around 30% for about a year prior to this spike.
 
I’m fascinated in watching these numbers (of course I’m easily amused) .  Will this be another 12 month plateau? Is there a penetration cap? Will the numbers accelerate?  It will be very interesting to follow.
 
We’ve never published our cell penetration numbers, this polling has pretty much been for our own in-house tracking.  Feel free to reference if you find it of interest.
 
Cell phone only households – Country P-1 – P 25-54
RadioTraks National Polling
 
March 2010 – 30.7%
Aug 2010 – 31.9%
Dec 2010 – 30.2%
Feb 2011 – 30.8%
March 2011 – 33.0%
May 2011 – 35.7%
Oct 2011 – 36.6%
Feb 2012 – 35.5%
 
 
Doug Burton
RadioTraks LLC
doug@radiotraks.com
414-755-0406 direct
866-614-1499 toll free

David said...

I'm not sure I'm following your line of reasoning here. Specifically, I'm not seeing the link between what your survey is saying about the penetration of CPO P1 25-54 country listeners and your comment about Arbitron and BBM "not delivering a consistent quality sample".

Am I missing something?

TheFakeTomSkinner said...

A&O's perceptual study has nothing to say about rating sample quality, but if you don't think it's a huge problem that this data on cell phone only homes which are under-represented in the sample, you need to talk to someone at a radio station who has to sell the quality and stability of the numbers to media buyers.