Now, Maybe We Know Why

Arbitron VP of Programming Services Gary Marince told the Jacobs Media Summer School at the Conclave in Minneapolis that the average radio listening occasion lasts ten minutes and the most frequently occurring duration is only two minutes.

Which reminded me of a presentation more than 15 years ago to A&O’s annual client seminar just before CRS in Nashville by Pierre Bouvard on what was back then a revolutionary new concept he and sales trainer Steve Marx had innovated called OES. They even wrote a book about it.

Today, Pierre is Executive Vice President, Cross-Platform Services and he previously was ARB’s Executive Vice President, Sales.

In the early 90's, he was Vice President/General Manager, Coleman Research and told us:

"Generally, Optimum Efficient Schedules are 40 to 60 spots per week. The goal of OES is to hit half your cume three or more times with ONE piece of copy. OES gets results. The reason it works: it applies programming theory to scheduling advertising on your station. In effect, it is placing a commercial into a "power current" rotation for a week. OES doesn't mean running two spots per hour from 6:00 am to 6:00 pm. Instead, it requires separating that one piece of copy by approximately two to three hours and blitzing the radio station with it six times in the 18 hours between 6:00 am to midnight. When scheduled properly, with good vertical and horizontal protections, there is no burnout. OES gets results for advertisers by convincing them to collapse what might otherwise be a three week budget and running it ALL in one week. Yet, when properly scheduled, it has no negative impact on programming or time spent listening. I do research among country listeners. The ONLY time I've heard them complain about commercials is one specific client - Nutri Systems - and it wasn't that they were running it too much, it was the creative hurt the image of some of the air personalities who were associating themselves with it. We hear listeners say 'why is it that only fat people work in radio?' Nutri Systems appears to realize that they hit that creative too hard and they now are changing their creative direction to compensate. Believe it or not, there is NO BURNOUT on this type of 60 to 70 spot per week schedule unless you have irritating copy. As a researcher who talks to listeners all the time, I can tell you that OES doesn't impact TSL. What it DOES impact is RESULTS. If you can convince an advertiser to try it once, they will come back to it again and again. And, they will end up spending more of the budget in radio. Because OES proves that radio works better."

Finally, I’d postulate that PPM also now shows why that math worked (and still works) so well and also why running the same spot two or three times in one hour only irritates listeners without improving results.

It increases frequency without building reach, creating burnout among that half of the audience who listens ten minutes per occasion on average rather than hitting more and more two minute drive-by listeners.

.. at least that's how it calculates on my "back of an envelope research."

OES ("optimum effective schedule") or OTS ("over-the-top spins)

Optimum Efficient Scheduling was never intended to be a guide to music scheduling, but just as with commercial "ROS" schedules of 12 and 18 times a week back when power rotations contained 9 or even 11 hits and a heavy rotation of 4 1/2 or 5 1/2 hours that math provided assurance to conservative programmers who improved their competition situation by upping the frequency on the most popular songs so that they play more often than they do on the folks across the dial.

With PPM's new math of doubled cume and "time spent exposed" (TSL/TSE) cut in half compared to diary measures, we all applied that old formula and upped the spins at some stations as high as once an hour and more widely two hours.

It seems to work and thanks to MScore tracking, it's no longer necessary to use an abstract formula. 

Now, you can literally watch and see if a higher spin count helps or hurts your usage.  In the chart to the left, one station's panel loves a song while another station in the same market's panel seems to hate it in the same period of time.

As repetition complaints from the small percentage of core listeners who say they have become dissatisfied with their favorite country station have become louder (though still only 15% of all listeners in A&O&B's 2014 survey), I think it's time to admit that there may be a perceptual toll to these tactics.

Yes, it seems that listeners have always said that they prefer variety and want less repetition and those beliefs can be tempered with online, callout and auditorium research, demonstrating that the right songs can be played heavily with "burn" and "dislike" tracked along the way.  Some folks now include "play less, play about the same, play more" in their online testing and listeners continue to say "play more" to the most popular tunes even as they get 75 spins in a week.

So, is it intelligent to simply ignore the repetition complaints and keep adding spins to the strongest titles as OES formulas seem to indicate?  As TSL and TSE drop and cume continues to trend upward, there is a siren song calling for just that.

Unless we're certain that we can keep increasing our cume hyper-spinning a small number of very popular songs - and I don't think we can - it seems to me that it's time to step back and look at the entire MScore, online testing, callout and auditorium data universe and recognize for the country format at least our listeners are extremely accepting of hundred and hundreds of songs which have little negative or burn.  Even with teens and 18-34, country isn't CHR.  We aren't limited to a very small library of common thread songs.

For example, the vast majority - hundreds - of gold, current and recurrent songs monitored by MScore at the average station track from between +4% to -4% which means they are all statistically virtually tied in terms of usage.  Only a very small number - often fewer than ten - float to the bottom having negative usage double the averages.

We are fortunate that our values and lifestyle appeal are pan-demographic, spanning at least five decades.

Let's look beyond one simple formula, use all of the tools to test music in our toolkit and think beyond just heavy play of one or two music categories.

It's time to start working as well on how long our heavy user/regulars listen in each occasion by offering more music new music discovery and impeccable song scheduling variety.

"Old" is OUT. "New" is IN.

The A artist base is changing, but that's not all as country's demos shift with the arrival of Generation Y at our horizon. So, let's start a list.

"Out"/"In"

• another ten in a row/commercial free hours
• no need to tell the names of the songs/Tell every title and artist
• timing DJ rap right up to the posts of songs/respect for the music, crush and roll, stop when you're finished, no talk over extros and then intros too
• EZ listening, oldies ac/hot ac
• the best/mine
• hype, hard sell/fun, humanness
• superlatives/stationality, attitude
• 12 minutes of commercials in six breaks per hour/10 units, two breaks, no more than three minutes in any QH
• jokes/tightly edited real local people on the phone, Facebook, Tweets
• friendly chatter/brevity, word efficiency
• ad libbing/self-editing
• 80's style positioning branding/benchmarking
• slogans/doing it, being it, not just saying it
• big on air contests/data base - silent contests
• promotions/more creative value-added involving online and off air events
• small prizes to the 10th caller/small prizes to everyone in the data base - off air
• contests and drawings/rewards
• requests/music rotations
• TAP plans/OES
• oldies features/countdowns
• memorability/memorability
• top of mindness/top of mindness

Dueling Stats

Last month’s Arbitron-Research Director revelation that 22.2% of PPM cume is “P-1” and delivers 52.4% of the average station’s total average quarter hours (Ratio: 2.36:1) spotlighted how radically the numbers programmers have learned to use to track performance have changed.

Diary averages remain 35.7% of the average station’s cume is “P-1,” delivering 70.4% of average quarter hours. (Ratio: 1.97:1)

Does the difference in the ratios mean that having one of your heaviest users in the PPM sample is 20% more important than it has been to achieve consistent performance in diary samples?

Other new metrics which also require further investigation:

Diary turnover ratio, your total cume divided by average quarter hour persons audience, equals the number of times a song or announcement must be played before about half your cume will hear it two times in a week.

With a diary review or making use of software like Maximiser or PD Advantage you can calculate how many days per week your average diarykeeper writes down in their diary.

4.1 days per week is the best I've seen. 3.6 days per week is a little on the low side. That additional half day of average "regularity" can make a MAJOR difference in your diary-based ratings.

In PPM, since meters are in motion, on average, almost two thirds of the hours in a 24 hour day and most of them are in use seven days a week, the need to extrapolate such things using math goes away. Using meters it’s possible to see exactly how many days per week, times per day and average minutes per occasion the average panelist listens to radio overall and also to your station specifically. For example, DMR has stated that 94% of PPM panelists consistently use the same amount of radio week after week, with the heaviest users turning on the radio 31 times per week for an average of 15 hours. Sixteen of those occasions are spent with their favorite station.

Diary studies for years have shown that you get most of your quarter hours from "at work" listening and most of the average station's cume comes from "in car." A typical station that had 60 25-54 10:00 am to 7:00 pm weekday diaries that reported "in car" listening to a station, 14 "at home" and 15 "at work." Those 15 "at work" diaries reported 346 quarter hours of total listening, while the 60 "car" books contributed 378 quarter hours. Typically, it can take four times the cume (diaries) from "in car" to equal the same number of quarter hours from typical "at work" listeners. People think that cume builds average quarter hour. In fact, IN CAR listening builds cume and AT WORK builds average quarter hour - and it is equally important to have BOTH. A healthy station could have at least 70% of its cume "in car" and a similar percentage of its quarter hour "at work."

PPM replicates that, making it clear that in car is where most people switch stations a lot and at work they tend to dial around a lot less.

What does that say about traditional turnover/reach and frequency (OES)-based music rotations?

PPM also appears to find more males who listen at work which diaries have failed to register, but diaries report more female at work listening than PPM does.

What's real?

It’s going to be interesting to learn more about the study by Alan Burns and Associates released today which reportedly shows one-quarter of all women who listen to adult contemporary and CHR formats believe there’s no station in their market that understands them. “And that leads to erosion in radio usage,” Burns says.

Interviews with more than 2,000 female radio listeners found that two-thirds of women who think no station “gets” them are listening to radio less as a result.

“Either their interests and values have changed, and radio hasn’t kept up, or radio has changed in ways they don’t appreciate,” Burns adds.

So which is it? PPM accurately measuring real drops in women’s usage of radio? Or, a bias built into diary vs PPM methodology?

If getting more men who listen at work into our targets is a key to doing better in PPM ratings, will radio move further away from the (long term) tastes of females in pursuit of (short term) higher shares?