Time For Programmers To Learn A New Language

This development is not at all surprising.

As usual, they want us to cut our inventories while refusing to pay anything more when we do it, in spite of considerable data proving radio's impact.

If the only way they will pay more is when "cost per point" hits media buyer wishes and dreams, it's crucial that the people creating content fully understand which quarter hours and programming tactics have the highest potential to get target GRPs, ultimately ARPs, as high as possible.

Let's stop worrying about 6+ average quarter hour shares, replacing those with the highest payoff target points.

That's an entirely new way to approach formatic, content and programming metrics.

It's going to require a quick learning curve for most Brand Managers, but A&O&B can help make it simple and very rewarding for you to do so.

Country's Upper Demos Are More Loyal In PPM Too

Inside Radio's report this morning on what's called "the largest format study ever based on PPM data" now includes radio’s 30 largest markets, calculated from an average of the January-September 2010 surveys, which will be presented next week in Baltimore, demonstrates that the less ethnic the market, the better the cume of the average country station and the country format overall.

“Yes, you have to have a high cume, and more specifically a high P1 cume,” says Research Director, Inc. partner Charlie Sislen. “But you also need high TSL among P1s, even though they are only a small portion of your total audience.”

The fewer country stations in a market the better in that measure the average PPM-rated country station appears to do, especially in younger demos.

18-34's average station share indexes .92 of the 6+ share of 3.9, while the 18-34 country format share is. .95 of the country format share of 7.4. The average country station share in these 30 markets 18-49 and 25-54 is .95 of the 6+ share, respectively, and 35-64 the average station share is a one to one relationship with 6+. Country format indexes by demo are better 18-49 (.99) and 35-64 (1.03), and worse in the more competitive 25-54 demo (.97).

Two educated guesses from a non-statistician:

1. PPM tends to favor country stations with the broadest demo P-1 cume reach across all age groups and may punish ones with narrower targets on the young side.
2. Compressed shares of audience are probably not due to PPM technology per se, but look to me to be the result of small samples which can under-represent any station or format which doesn't have very similar shares in all geographies and age groups.

Woe to you if you have a weak signal or a station/format with polarized appeal or which does better in only some metro zip codes, demos or ethnicities.

Good for you if you dominate your format's listening profile. To the usage leader go the spoils.

In PPM Your So-Called "Hot Zips" Are Really ARB's Or BBM's Hot Zips

My first reaction to last week's Arbitron-The Research Director webinar on the primacy of "P-1" listeners in driving average quarter hour audience in PPM measurement was "so what else is new?"

The P1 Effect: How First Preference Listeners Drive Ratings In A PPM World (June 2010):
First Preference listeners, are THE primary driver of Average Quarter-Hour audience. 10 years ago, Research Director, Inc.'s groundbreaking analysis proved it in a diary world….but how crucial is P1 listening to a station's ratings success in PPM? (pdf - 37 pages/3,829k) Also, click here to see a recorded presentation of this study by Charlie Sislen. (Streamed Windows Media File/approximately 35 minutes over broadband connection).

Then, it hit me that what IS new is that many of us need to rethink what a "P-1" is before fully grasping the importance of the new data.

In even the largest markets country stations have fewer than 20 "PPM-defined hot zips," areas with a higher than average incidence rate of country radio heavy users in the PPM panel.

Of course, the typical country station actually has as many as five times as many REAL hot zip code areas, as our own databases and many years of diary samples have proven, but the majority of them simply don't count as often as they used to because of the small PPM sample size.

You may be very popular and used regularly by a majority of the folks in some areas of your metro, but if those key demographics and geographies are not proportionately represented in the sample, it's going to look like you have no listeners.

So, since panelists being retained in the sample for as long as possible is ARB and BBM's goal, the panel you have is the panel you must learn to live with.

It's important to really understand how the panelists who make use of your radio station live their lives, why they use other stations and work with that matrix while trying not to water your product and marketing down so that you don't diminish your brand essence, which is the key to long-term success.

In PPM, P1 is not a description of "loyalty" or "brand depth," it's all about the amount of usage and that is all. Heavy radio users listen to many, many more stations than the average radio user.

The good side of that fact is that building cume is really not as necessary as we all thought it was based on recall measurement. We all have twice as much cume as we thought we did.

But, the bad news is that those folks are barely aware of a great majority of the radio they use.

Clutter, over-commercialization, hype, songs listeners dislike or are tired of and air personality content that doesn't immediately grab and hold a listener hurt "P-1" listening.

A station position, personality, song or benchmark that a radio user loves may actually drive that person away from the station more times than their strong positive image brings them back, compared to the other choices.

That's the "P-1" Sislen encourages us to focus on in PPM markets.