How Many Stations And Formats Is PPM Going To Kill Off?

An 18-34 ranker in one of the PPM markets ARB released last week is six pages long. Almost three of those pages have next to no numbers at all on them.

Prediction: we will see more WDTW's giving up trying to be the #2 player in PPM, which will be a boon to the one which lasts.

Ironically, WYCD outlasted its previous competition (WWWW) nine years ago too and now the CBS/Detroit team is once again celebrating the glow of being a format dominator, so there's a lesson in this as well. Don't pull the plug too soon, if you think the other guys may do it first.

Being the only country station in a PPM market may be as powerful as being one of two or three - fighting for metered time spent exposed in this format with geographic hot and cold spots - is difficult.

Do You Know Where You Are Going?

Tamara Stanners is APD of Vancouver/AAA The Peak. She recently conducted some air staff coaching while I was a fly on the wall and since PPM in Canada is a minute-by-minute game, when she talked, I listened:

"One of the first things we learn as writer/communicator!s is to start with the end in mind. To have a clear goal of where we want our radio magic to go. What some of us seem to have forgotten is that knowing where to go is just the first step."

We also have to make sure the journey to our destination is well thought out of and concise. Meandering all over the road and going backwards to retrace steps just doesn't work on the radio.

It doesn't work in life either. Don't waste the listener's time. Don't waste your own.

If they've figured out what you're saying, they may stop listening even if you don't stop talking.

Think things through. Write them out if you have to. Make sure the beginning/middle and end are all worth doing. If they are not, don't do it. Do nothing. It's better than sounding like you don't know what you are doing.

Be GREAT! That is why you are here.

Mark Ramsey at NAB Radio Show: Radio Should Drop Arbitron

He's always provocative, and last Friday in Philadelphia he was even more so than usual. And, as a continuation of my frustrated post below, this video (click to watch it) makes some powerful assertions, worth turning my blog over to today.

Reconciling Two New Arbitron Reports (...And, Worrying!)

Last week, ARB released the first Radio Today update in two years, and added lots of great information on who uses as many as 57 different radio formats, where, when and how.

Then, just a day later, the company in association with Coleman Research put out another report looking at America's Most Successful stations and formats in PPM.

Unfortunately, it appears to purport that all but perhaps ten of those formats aren't going to drive enough cume to do well in metered measurement. Their lower cumes aren't large enough to consistently penetrate the smaller PPM sample. The great TSL and high loyalty which drove their success in diary measurement no longer registers as important to doing well in PPM methodology.

Shares no longer count very much, we are now told, since in PPM the majorty of lower cume stations all cluster together at the bottom of the new ranker, separated by small fractions ... which comes as quite a shock to many sellers and buyers who have become accustomed for four decades to using that metric to value the medium.

I am now staring nostalgically at these format performance indications from diaries, fearful that future "Radio Today" reports - as more markets drop diaries and move to PPM - will exhibit the disappearance of many mid-rankers, as they go from viability to financial starvation (unless they can find a way to grow a lot more "cume" - read that "get more meters of their heavy users in the sample" - and fast!).

By and large, PPM is treating Country well, but even our most successful stations in PPM have more cume and get many more listening occasions from their heaviest-users than the average does. Is this because their brands are stronger? Their execution is better?

Or, that they just were lucky enough to get meters into the hands of their listeners?


The rub: in highly-ethnic markets, the format gets very little cume from all but non-ethnic households, which can have "cume" (or, more correctly, number of meters) ramifications for both us and minority broadcasters.

How's this for an idea?

Since Arbitron is now saying that it plans to also measure "engaged" listening as well as "exposure," - which so much of PPM cume is - simply do one diary-based survey per year with a robust sample in every market so we can all rely on the accuracy of the audience shares of the engaged audience we have all come to trust and buy from for decades, and then, for those who want more accountability, track the behavior of individual station and format users, without trying to pass that much smaller sample off as an accurate measure of the size of average quarter hour audiences of stations with less reach and more loyal listeners.

Who says we have to choose between measuring exposure and engagement?

Can't you measure and compare both for us, please, Arbitron?

.. Just as you did so well in the last week.

"I Don’t Think You Can Trick The People Meter"

“The jury is still out, but all these tips and tricks scare me a little bit. Instead of manipulating the listeners into listening, but annoying them at the same time, isn’t it better to consistently entertain, so they’ll come back without trickery? Just a thought.” -- Dave Ryan, in August Morning Mouth

Not What Arbitron Needed Today

Dr. Barry Blesser, Director of Engineering, 25-Seven Systems just released a report which claims that although ARB's PPM 'can be expected to be extremely reliable when tested under "typical" conditions...there may be real-world scenarios that dramatically degrade PPM performance,' and encouraging 'radio stations that believe their listenership has been inaccurately reported by the PPM system may wish to determine if their context deviates from the assumptions upon which the PPM system is designed.'

Could "listening in a noisy environment or with the monitor positioned to receive only a muffled signal, increasing the likelihood that the PPM monitor will not correctly detect the stations' ID..." include inside a woman's purse? If so, could that explain why female listening to radio appears to be much lower as reported in PPM than it is in the diary ratings or why early morning listening levels are also so much lower?

Following The Bouncing PPM Data

Todd Wallace, DJ/PD/Programming Consultant/Researcher/Publisher known as the 'Father of Callout Research', which he pioneered in early 1970s writes to correct my semantics. In yesterday's post, I termed fluctuations in PPM weeklies "wobbles." Todd points out that a better word for it may be "bounce."

While the target sample-size in meters for most major markets is larger than the average number of monthly diaries were, it is much smaller than the quarterly total of diaries and unique households sampled over the 84 days of the quarterly survey in a typical Arbitron diary “book.”

What this means: while there will be less sampling “wobble” than we would have seen with diary monthly-isolations, there may be more such “bounce” when compared to a full quarterly diary report.

Ratings Bonuses In A PPM World

PPM Strategist and longtime radio research analyst Charlotte Lawyer and I had an exchange 60 days ago on how bonus structures may change for on air talent in PPM:

"I had a program director ask me about using aqh ratings. I always used AQH persons rank or share goal in diary, and/or cume for some stations depending on format and goals. With ratings so compressed now you can have maybe a .3 rating separating #1 and #10. I suggested he use aqh persons because of the compression and consider adding TSL. This PD's stations (spoken word) have great tsls in ppm. Do you have any thoughts?"

At the time we talked about it, but I didn't blog it, thinking that it was a pretty narrow subject area for universal interest. Then came "KRBE, Houston’s Ryan Chase (says) a temporarily messed-up sample due to Hurricane Ike cost him “a sixth of my income.”) and the online chatter about Ryan Seacrest and Kevin & The Bean.

What to do when the change wrought by a new method of measurement is no longer motivating, but actually frustrating, demotivating, to talent?

Samples are one-third of what they used to be, shares are too compressed, hair-raising wobbles appear to be weekly events and in some markets format shares for whole groups of stations and styles of personalities seem to be turned upside down.

I agree with the idea of bonusing on AQH person rank rather than share, but even that can seem unfairly capricious, given that it only takes a handful of panelists to dislike something to doom a station or talent.

So, how about trying this on for size: bonus talent on a metric they can control, comparing to their past trend rather than other stations or personalities on the metric which drives PPM ratings, the number of listening occasions in their daypart?

Get your panelists to come back to the station more times, earn a bonus. Have panelists listen for fewer occasions this month compared to last month, lose a bonus.

To be motivating, a bonus needs to reflect something talent can control. To do well, you incent the behavior you want.

Do you have a better idea? I'd love to hear it.

Applying PPM Lessons From Morning Usage And Behavior To All Listeners

I'll leave questions of reliability and projectability of the PPM morning quantitative numbers to others, but one thing we've always known is certainly demonstrated by the micro-trends PPM measurement permits: morning drive listeners' tune in and out at a rapid pace, especially in what has always been known as "The Power Hour," 7-8 am.

And, as Morning Show Boot Camp discussions today in Nashville show, talent is learning that the majority of your audience is only catching bits and pieces as they hurry through their morning routine.

As a result, it is easy to feel you are being somewhat redundant after a while if you are looking at the entire show from start to finish.

The time-tested advice has been to look at the morning show as several "15 minute mini-shows" instead of one long show and PPM certainly vindicates this technique.

Make sure you deliver all the important elements such as weather, time checks, news, traffic, topical information, etc. in each of those "mini-shows." Understand what your listeners expect from you and over-deliver on that, eliminating things which take away from that usage driver.

It will also sound less redundant if you relate information such as the weather in the way it will effect the listener I.E.: "take your umbrella today...more rain in the forecast." However, it's also traditional wisdom to benchmark each important service/information element with your station name and a unique identity, such as "traffic and weather together," or "the official FM weather station," but why do that if five other stations also use those phrases and every station also does them?

The diary was about branding elements for memorability. In a metered world, it all comes down to understanding what your partisans use you for and delivering that a lot.

The jury is still out on 'no talk segues' for me. No doubt they extend usage, having removed any indication that the momentum is stopping. But, when doing music sweeps in morning drive (even two songs back to back) I still encourage personalities to very quickly tease what is coming up, ID and position the station, cross-promote to another listening occasion.

My thinking: listening lengths are short in the morning, and "no talk segues" may send the message that "this show is boring and never gives me the services I need." If someone is listening for a specific bit of information such as traffic, weather, etc. they are less likely to tune elsewhere to find it if they know it's only moments away.

What's working for you? It's a brave new PPM world, especially in mornings. We're all on a learning curve right now, making adustments, watching the competition, making the most of a totally new way of looking at almost everything.

Of Skarzynski, Kabrich And PPM Samples (Again)

As Arbitron CEO Michael Skarzynski “welcomes any opportunity to discuss the importance of electronic measurement, the effectiveness of the PPM technology, the value of the data it produces, and our disciplined approach to the deployment of the service...” and heads to the House Of Representatives for a committee hearing (Oversight and Government Reform) to defend the company's device, sample sizes and fairness to minorities, consultant Randy Kabrich follows up his 2008 study and shows once again that sample size is directly related to PPM success for any but major mass appeal stations.

“One of the reasons that certain formats do not perform well in PPM (certain niche formats like smooth jazz to Hispanic formats) is heavily tied to the amount of sample available. It is all the more critical for Arbitron to have a balanced sample – correctly balanced by age, gender, ethnicity, geography, and socio-economic factors.”

Pity the poor station with a signal problem in even a very small part of their metro survey area or an audience that lives/works in only specific zip + four neighborhoods.

Will ARB work with owners/managers/programmers of these stations to drive their coverage area with a "test meter" to verify that the encoding is being picked up?

What should they do if they find a metered household in a small area within a zip code where an isolated signal issue is going to cost a subscribing station or format lots of revenue for the next 18 to 24 monthly books while they wait for that home to cycle out of the sample?

As Randy says (above) and your humble scribe posits as a result: the only way to assure that any station - ethnic or not - with that problem to get a fair shake over the long-term is for ARB's sample proportionality to be at least three times better than it has ever been, given a sample one third the size of the diary in-tab.

Why Are We Doing This?

You have to hand it to Arbitron. Many of their client stations and groups complain that they don't listen or act on suggestions which seem quite sensible, but whether that's true or not, the company certainly does a very impressive job of telling clients and consultants on a consistent basis what they are working on and why. For example, during the latest PPM conference call/update, they released these stats on how PPM ratings compare to diary estimates, so that advertisers can understand the differences between diary audience shares and PPM listening levels.

Radio sales reps have a very difficult job in the PPM markets, as they present weekly AQH persons, AQH shares and cost per point, since before they even start the sales process they must first 're-educate' the buyer on why what they previously paid $100 for is now worth $118 if the target is 18-49, $123 if it's 18-34 and $114 if the client wants to reach 25-54.

All of this is based on the standard measure of radio ratings for at least six or seven decades, the "average quarter hour." Why does five minutes listening inside a quarter hour equal a quarter hour? Once upon a time, radio was programmed in fifteen minute blocks. Advertisers from the 1920's to the 1950's wanted to know how many listeners were tuned into their fifteen minute program. In the late 1940's, the "diary" was invented as a way to measure audiences and the standard of measurement remained the average quarter hour. It's been like that since.

PPM shows radio's many strengths as a medium in so many other ways, in terms of both reach and accountability in a much more believable and granular way than the diary ever could.

Today's PPM is capable of measuring listening behavior down to listening units of a minute or even shorter durations. Canada's BBM is now measuring radio and television audiences and the standard unit will be average minute audiences, which seems to be a more accurate measure, requiring no math to allow an advertiser to know how many folks watched or heard their ad, something they could never have done with diary data.

Isn't it time to stop playing games to get listeners artificially to spend the 'right' twenty minutes inside four quarter hours so that it appears that they listened for an hour? Why not simply drop average quarter hour as the standard for ARB PPM measurement and show how large radio's audience is in every single minute, seven days a week?

Radio Ratings Questions

Richard Harker has been blogging some important questions about the current state of radio ratings (Arbitron, We Have a Question: What Happened to the Button-Pushers?), such as:

When PPM identifies a radio station and then the audio switches to an unidentifiable source, it is recorded as a switch to non-encoded media. No more radio credit is given. But what if the participant really just switched stations, but PPM couldn't identify it? Could this explain lower listening estimates and the absence of button pushers with PPM?

Now, I’d like to add a few more of my own:

Nielsen research from their Lexington diary test earlier this year found cell phone-only households are heavier radio users, while Arbitron has reportedly come to a totally different conclusion. Their new spokesperson told Inside Radio yesterday “There does not appear to be different listening behavior.”

Are the differences based on diary measurement vs metered usage? Or, is there really no difference in radio usage between the kind of people who would not have a land line home phone and those who do? Who’s right? How can we know for sure? Will Nielsen and Arbitron (or the RAB?) fund an academic study of this?

When Nielsen announced their 2009 radio survey in the U.S., they talked about releasing the data in June. Now, company insiders say they are working toward a tentative launch date of August 17, which just happens to be three days after the last Spring 2009 Arbitrons have been released.

Why the change, in spite of the fact that Nielsen’s local market surveys started and ended a month before ARB’s?

Nielsen, it seems, has chosen to have the luxury of seeing ARB’s Spring 2009 local market reports before they give ARB a look at their data in the markets they both have been surveying this spring.

Why keep their Cumulus and Clear Channel subscribers waiting for the data like this? Or, are subscribers seeing the first Nielsen radio data this month and were they a part of the decision to delay the release?

In Canada, where BBM is discontinuing their use of Nielsen TV meters, lowering their client TV station subscriber rates as they embark on using PPM for all media measurement, keeping radio rates the same as they have been for diary surveys (unlike Arbitron which is charging 60% more), diary sample proportionality in market after market is causing hair-raising levels of weighting - making for wild book-to-book swings.

Has BBM already done the replication study I am asking about? Or, are they moving ahead with PPM merely because of the economies of scale for their subscribers?

Confusing as all of this is right now, it's good to see so many different approaches being tried by broadcast researchers.

Once all of this data is available to independent observers in the coming year, we're going know a lot more about what's unquestionably fact .. and what's just preliminary theory.

Is THIS Why They Call The Future "A Brave New World"?

Director of Technical Sales for RCS Barry Hill's Conclave webinar last week was a fascinating presentation of the new analytical tools Media Monitors has been developing to help us all understand the new world of radio listener usage and behavior data coming online in both the U.S. and Canada, thanks to PPM.

For example, since it has always been a leap of faith requiring a certain amount of bravery to add new music, it was very comforting to see what appears to be the "normal pattern of a typical song's spin life" on the average station in this Miley Cyrus song's history of airplay and listener tracking:

After six or seven weeks of growing familiarity and acceptance, the courageous programmer is rewarded with 14 weeks or so of positive listening growth each time the song plays to be followed by the inevitable burn which turns into more tune-out than tune-in.

Before you jump to the conclusion that PPM clearly demonstrates that the average current hit's life is 20-22 weeks, take a gander at this one (guaranteed to give Alanis' promotion team some heartburn) a good example of the fact that PPM panelists sometimes do what they do and it simply defies obvious logic:

Up in August, down in September, up in October, down in November, up in December, down in January, then up for nine weeks in a row! Huh? Is it somehow seasonal in its appeal? Does it burn after four weeks and then stop being negative in another month in spite of/because of continued airplay? Are some panelists going away for a few weeks and then coming back into the panel? Or, WHAT?

"Ironic," indeed.

If you have a more plausible explanation of what's happening with this tune, I'd love to hear it. Meanwhile, this info should serve as proof that radio programming remains 50% science and 50% art and no high tech tool - as yet, at least - has changed that.

Beasley Broadcast Group President/COO Bruce Beasley Says What Arbitron Hasn't

Last week, he blamed poor Arbitron PPM panel management on his quarterly analyst earnings conference call as one reason why the company’s Philadelphia revenues (off 31%) have been down more than the market average (which slipped 21%).

It’s not a secret that country’s core target is 35-54 and largely non-ethnic living more in suburbs than in the center of cities, so just as ARB was working to placate unhappy ethnic stations by improving the proportionality of African-Americans and Hispanics and calling its sample “solid” (September 2008) it now admits (according to Beasley) under-indexing of the 35-54 demo in those same months last fall of WXTU’s ratings decline.

Beasley claimed that 92.5 XTU had been consistently in the market’s top six or seven during the first year and a half of pre-currency and then the initial currency PPM monthlies, leading the company to believe that PPM was going to be kind to country radio, but, as minority broadcasters pushed ARB to improve the index of their listeners’ in the PPM panel, for some reason, WXTU fell to the low to mid-teens in the rankers.

Every country manager and programmer needs to demand, hope for, ask for, beg for, pay for excellent sample balance each month, at the very least within 10% +/-, in our targets too.

The Beasley exec last week told investors he feels that Arbitron is now correcting the problem:

“Recently we’ve seen some progress on 35-54 sampling and expect the revenue trend at WXTU to improve.”

He also said he “expects that [Arbitron] will not repeat the issue that impacted us in Philadelphia..” in Miami, where the company also owns WKIS, the country station in another highly ethnic market.

Are the same ARB people who provided those "solid" assurances last fall the ones promising Beasley that things are now under control in their markets?

Ask any researcher: sampling is both art and science. As sample sizes get smaller, “panel management” is the name of the art which Arbitron must consistently master equitably or everyone’s business is going to suffer.

Classic Country Rides The Riverside Rapids

A fast lesson in PPM heartburn: the Inland Empire's classic country The Toad went in January's monthly from a .7 6+ all the way up to an impressive 3.0 in February, but now falls back to near oblivion (0.2) in the March PPM book.

What could have done it? Who knows?
Perhaps an ultra core fan of the station cycled into and out of the panel?


Or, was that big February the result of cell phone weighting? Is that why ARB has stopped doing that?

Who knows?

And, of course, this is the one market where ARB has PPM accreditation... (??)

Averages

For years I have been saying that the average Arbitron diary keeper writes 2.6 radio stations in their book during the survey week and the average BBM ballot contains an average of 2.2 station mentions, which convinced me over time after many diary and ballot reviews that pretty much every diary respondent in both the U.S, and Canada wrote down, more or less, ‘two or three’ radio stations.

I'm betting that a lot of us have programmed our radio stations based on those numbers.

Somewhere deep down I have always known that if two people are in a room, one of them weighs 300 pounds and the other’s weight is 100, there is no one in the room even close to the ‘average’ of the two, but it has taken PPM data emerging over the last few years from Montreal, Philadelphia and Houston to prove how far my (not so) "educated" guess was from the truth, and how different each market can be when you start to see data as granular as PPM permits.

BBM reports that the Montreal electronic data shows - in a city with English speakers, French speakers and bilinguals and radio stations for each of those groups - that people actually, on average, tune into four or five radio stations.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. PPM markets out so far the average meter measures listening to six or seven stations.

In Canada, panelists are permitted to stay in the sample for up to five years, while in America, ARB removes them after two.

ARB VP PPM Sales John Snyder and Michelle Barker of Arbitron’s Research staff crunched some PPM data from Philadelphia in November 2008 (each dot is one meter in the sample) and found that two people actually listened to 25 different radio stations.

During the same month in New York, five panelists cumed between 26 and 30 stations (click on the graphic to enlarge it).

Conclusion: those averages I have been living with for my entire radio career were wrong; which becomes more obvious now that we can see real usage without the bias of top of mind recall.

I’ve always believed it, but now I know for sure: when we see PPM data from the rest of Canadian major markets and more American large markets later this year, we’re going to find that radio listening in Quebec is not the same as it is in Calgary, which is different from Toronto, which is different from Vancouver, which is different from San Francisco, which is different from Atlanta.

Yes, we've all been saying it for years: every market is different.

Now, we are getting the data which proves it.

Exactly Which ARB Neighborhoods Those "Charming, Engaging And Persuasive Bilinguals" Are Walking Through

Thanks to Pierre Bouvard, Arbitron's President/Sales and Marketing for a personal briefing and an assurance that ARB doesn't like any format's listeners more than others.


He pointed me to the Latest Monthly PPM Client Update to show that it's possible to figure out where those ARB workers are visiting homes of PPM panelists, the places where the index of compliance is falling below the benchmark. (A "DDI" (index) of 100 means that a cell doesn't have to be weighted up or down, because it's in perfect proportion to the age/sex/ethnic groups percentage of the actual population).

Not surprisingly, they are treading the streets of the places where the people in red in the above chart live, to see if with some personal contact they can encourage those folks to carry their meters as much as the average panelist does.

Ask anyone who has ever done a radio station personal appearance, face-to-face contact and personal bonding can make a difference. Hopefully your air personalities and promotional street teams are also "charming, engaging and persuasive" as they meet listeners.

Arbitron may actually like country listeners BETTER than other formats (my statement, not Pierre's, of course), since the 45+ non-ethnic PPM panelists are generally very compliant in carrying their meters above the average, for one example, in Chicago.


All cells over age 45+ actually have to be weighted DOWN in the final sample because of how cooperative they are, which is why no ARB reps need to walk the streets where they live, according to Bouvard. ARB's goal is to have to do as little weighting as possible, of course.

He also passed along a couple other factiods we're learning as a result of metered measurement:

1. 60% of all radio listening by 6-11 year olds is done in the proximity of their parents.
2. Radio's reach (the highest cume stations) every day exceeds that of the daily newspaper:


Longtime "Dr. Diary" at ARB, Ed Cohen adds one more: PPM samples are currently being weighted by more factors than diary samples have traditionally been: "Here are the weighting variables as of today (and of course, there can be some variation by market):

Age/sex
Geography
Race/ethnic (black and Hispanic varying by market pops)
Language within Hispanic where available
Employment status
Presence of children
Telephone status (landline versus cell phone only)"

This is a fact, I can personally attest to: ARB's research staff works very hard to get it right, and are dedicated to working with radio to position our medium and all formats as effectively in the marketplace as we all deserve.

I See Paragon's Bob Harper And RAISE Him One

Harper's blog post today isn't about birds, though it starts with that old DJ wild track calling for another canary. It's about a very wise broadcaster advocate named Bob, who is anything but a patsy, in spite of its title: "Patsies Pay More."

I am 100% certain if Paragon did a study for a client and, on presentation day, we told him: “I know we said there would be 600 respondents, but we’re pretty sure 507 will be okay. And, some of these age breaks only have one respondent, but we’re pretty comfortable with that, too,” we would never work in broadcasting again. But, yet, the PPM train persistently chugs along. The squeeze, now that PPM has left the depot: 1) Arbitron will want lots more money from Radio to quickly make their shaky product acceptable. 2) Agencies will be demanding accountability, posting, and guarantees. -- Bob Harper

Bob, I see you. In fact. I HEAR you and here's my ante: Is there any other broadcast research company which would have the temerity to actually contract for a project and then after delivering the results ask for either more money or propose changes in the methodology to cut their costs of doing the job right? Especially, after this company had developed and perfected that methodology for more than a decade?