They Know Our Streaming Product Isn't As Good

We have work to do.

  -- A&O&B Roadmap 2014

Can Online Usage Reinvent Radio At Home?

Trend:  as television has reinvented their morning newscasts in the form of traditional morning radio shows, many folks have been turning to radio later in the morning, as they get into their vehicles.

Will personal mobile devices give your radio station a new "at home usage" opportunity?

BUT, meanwhile, the vehicle is under attack at the same time:

.. especially with our long term future listeners.

The national averages, of course, are fascinating but meaningless, really, except as a comparison to your local performance.  Are you ahead of/behind the curve on every data point?  There's only one way to know and that is to do local research.

 - A&O&B Roadmap 2014

Online Listening To Audio Doesn't Hurt AM/FM Usage

In fact, among core country fans, it appears to increase it!

Your listeners are looking for you where ever they use audio media and that change is coming fast:

The national averages, of course, are fascinating but meaningless, really, except as a comparison to your local performance.  Are you ahead of/behind the curve on every data point?

There's only one way to know and that is to do local research.

- A&O&B Roadmap 2014

What (Where) Is Radio?

Radio is where today's listener expects it to be.

-- A&O&B "Roadmap 2014"

Roadmap 2014: Country Listeners Are Increasingly Social

Sure, Facebook is big.  BUT there isn't one emerging social medium that isn't picking up more of our listeners on a daily basis.

(My Space?  What's THAT?)

The national averages, of course, are fascinating but meaningless, really, except as a comparison to your local performance.  Are you ahead of/behind the curve on every data point?

There's only one way to know and that is to do local research.

- A&O&B Roadmap 2014 

"AM, FM, XM too.."

Even the most satisfied core listener sometimes gets pushed away by their favorite radio station doing something they don't like.

Where do they go when that happens?

A little less than half punch another preset.  One in four goes to their own digital player, but after that the other 2014 "second choices" are not what they used to be!

If you're not planning ways right now to prevent Luke Bryan from looking for things to rhyme with "Pandora, Slacker and iPod too" in his next single, it's time to start.

 - A&O&B Roadmap 2014

A Roadmap 2014 Sneak Preview

More than 9,000 country radio listeners from nearly 100 radio stations participated in A&O&B's Roadmap 2014.  This is nearly double the number of stations whose listeners completed the online survey and an increase of 43% in sample size from 2013.
75% reside the USA and 25% live in Canada  Demos were fairly well-balanced, with huge growth in the under-35 cells:

13%  18-24
21% 25-34
19% 35-44
25% 45-54
16% 55-64

90% called a country station "their first choice."

Just 13% agreed with the stations that country music is worse than it used to be.

58% said they spend more than two hours per day with their favorite country station and 33% listened 1-2 hours daily.

72% called themselves very satisfied with their favorite country station.  Fewer than 1% said that they are "very dissatisfied" with the country station they listen to the most.

In short:  these are passionate fans of country music who use radio heavily.

The national averages are certainly fascinating to ponder, but the real utility of these numbers for A&O&B clients is to compare every data point in the study with their local listener perceptions to spot both problems and opportunities by knowing more about their audience.

Milking That "Outdated Research" One More Time

Seldom do I post data that A&O&B clients saw a year ago and get as much response as I have to my previous article.

Folks have called, posted and emailed positing numerous theories as to why country radio's "satisfaction" scores have trended downward for the last two years and "willing to try a new radio station" has trended up (though both remain at levels many other formats would envy!):

• The music isn't as good as it was two years ago?
• Too many irritating commercials?
• Too much repetition?
• Over-reliance on voice-tracking and not enough 24/7 engagement?
• Weak digital outreach?
• Lack of marketing?

Here's my take, for what it's worth.

Of course, all of that are challenges we need to work harder on, but so do all other radio formats too and they are hardly unique to country radio.  I think a large factor is simply generational shift, aging out folks from our target who might have accepted a "we talk/you listen" broadcast approach.

It may be that we're not worse that we were one, two, three years ago.  It's just that today's listener simply demands more from us.

Going back to doing what we did in the past won't solve the problem.

It's Time For Your Annual Checkup

For the ninth year A&O&B client stations across the USA and Canada will be inviting their listeners to take a test.

When the results of "Roadmap 2014" are available in about a month, it will be the individual radio stations getting their grades by core listeners.

The study goes into the field this week in over 90 markets in the US and Canada and the national trends will be revealed at A&O&B's annual Pre-CRS 2014 client seminar.

Satisfaction levels last year were highest with 35-44's and lowest, though still very good, with 25-34.

Reliance drives behavior.  Measures of listening like loyalty, time spent listening, core vs fringe and tune in occasions are all driven by a feeling of regular daily reliance on a personality or radio station.

Importance, an internal realization a personality or radio station has become valuable to the listener drives perceptions which can drive that behavior. 

These "average" levels in Roadmap seem to have peaked three years ago and appeared to be trending downward for the last two years.  Each individual station performs uniquely of course and knowing if you're better or worse than average is a crucial success factor.

• How much do listeners rely on your radio station this year?  
• How important in their lives is it?

Switchability of the average country radio listener seems to have gotten easier and easier little by little over the last five years.

There's only one way to reverse those troublesome trends and that is to know what they are.   A&O&B is committed to measuring them again right now. 

Invite your listeners to be a part of this annual exam.  If you want to learn how, let's talk soon. 

Your 2014 ratings depend on it.

Change

It's terrific to see Nielsen so quickly releasing studies putting radio in a cross-media light (ie., A Loyal Companion: Radio Remains a Great Way to Reach Local Consumers).

Before celebrating the average daily time spent listening of AM-FM radio in 2013 of two hours let's also dig into their archives from the Arbitron days for a historical perspective.

Of course, a decade ago all of the data was diary survey based so comparing "then" to "now" is apples vs oranges, since if we had national PPM data in 2003 cumes would have been higher and hours tuned would have been lower given the differences between top of mind measurement vs actual usage tracking.

Nonetheless, it's worthwhile just between friends to contemplate the biggest change in radio over the decade:

2013:

It would be an oversimplification to focus solely on the 30% loss of time spent listening to all radio documented by our largest ratings company over those ten years, but it's clear that this is no time to be complacent about usage of our medium.

All of us who create today's "radio" are in a battle against time!

We are in a fight for every minute, every listening occasion, every day of our users' increasingly precious time - by giving them more and better than their other choices.

Or the trendline over the coming years will continue to be a downhill slide.

Can We Finally Talk About More Consistently Engaging Content?

First, please read Billboard.biz's Ross on Radio column today, Can We Finally Talk About Spotload? by Sean Ross.   Don't read another word here until you fully understand Sean's point.

Under the new thinking, shorter listening stretches became almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. The brief moment in which a top 40’s power rotation could  be 45 minutes has mostly passed. But there’s still an emphasis on instant gratification—e.g., all-news stations with traffic every four minutes, even if it means sending people on their way sooner.  But how many more occasions can you get from listeners if the three places where they might have consumed radio are down to one, in some cases? “At home” is diminished by the competition from morning TV and, increasingly, by the lack of a radio at home. “At work,” the usage that lends itself to long listening stretches, is threatened by other choices that offer even more continuous music and fewer interruptions.

Don't think that just because you read that paragraph it's really now OK to read on.

No.

I want you to click on that link above and read his entire piece, so that you are fully aware that I agree with him as far as he goes but also believe he's totally missing something more obvious and even more important.

To make my point, I want to share this graphic being used in presentations all over Canada on PPM listening lengths by Catherine KellyVice-President/Western Region for BBM.

It's a view of life at breakfast time at Catherine's house.  She undocks her meter, turns on her radio and starts to get the family ready to face their days.

One of her kids is slow to get out of bed, so she has to go up to his room at least twice before he comes down ready to go.  The dog needs a walk.  She's busy and moving all over the house.

In about 45 minutes her PPM listening is broken into four sessions totalling 39 minutes.

The radio stations she's using could stop for commercials whenever they want.  They can tease as enticingly as they desire.  They could cut their commercial loads.  They could hyper-spin her favorite songs, and none of those things will impact the reasons she's leaving the radio and coming back to it.

It's about what she's doing, not about what we are doing.

Here's the deal on the “9-10 Minute” myth of the "average" occasion length, as Kelly explains:

• Much has been made about the 10 minute attention span of radio listeners – apparently brought about by insights from PPM.

• When looking at number of listening events and average session length, it is consistent to see a session length of between 9 and 11 minutes.

• Keep in mind, these numbers are averages – they include people who listen for 30 minutes and people who listen for 3 minutes.

In fact, here's the math:  if you break session length into quantiles of usage, the session for the average "heavy user" is 35 minutes.

Meanwhile, if you calculate the "mode," the most frequently-occurring number in that nine-ten minute average is actually 2:30.  Two and a half minutes.

That's why moving the average is so difficult, not because we play too many bad songs or too many commercials.

Sure, it makes your PPM ratings better if you play the best songs and minimize interruptions for the switching audience, which absolutely changes stations while they are in the car each time anything they don't like comes on, but MScore, AirplayIntel and other PPM-based music research is based on tracking only the "switching" audience, those folks who switch from one station to another.

That's only half of the total audience.

The other half isn't tracked by that approach because their listening goes from "you" to "off" and from "off" to "you."

Those are your most loyal listeners and yet the PPM-based music research doesn't measure their usage.

Rather than focusing so much on eliminating reasons why people change stations, it's just as important to figure out what things you do bring those people back and do those things more often.

Have A Nice Piece Of Pie!

Coady Diemar's Chris Ensley:  Terrestrial radio’s reach has remained relatively flat over the years. For example, in 2001 radio reached 95% of the U.S. 12+ population, and today it reaches 93%. However, over the same time frame the U.S. population has grown, and as a result, so too has radio’s weekly reach, as we show in the chart below. Arbitron recently estimated that radio reaches 241 million Americans over the age of 12 each week, and based on our estimates, we believe that reflects approximately 16 million incremental listeners relative to 2001, when we estimate the industry reached 225 million weekly listeners. 

TV viewing trends (the broadcast networks) typically experienced ratings declines in the mid-to high single digit range, but had made up for that through pricing increases. In the chart below, we look at time spent listening to terrestrial radio and note that in the first half of the last decade, time spent listening declines were very modest, roughly 1.2%-1.3% per year.

 

Click here, hit print, smile and hand to sales manager now.