Arbitron’s Jon Miller suggests a few ways to better zero in on who your listeners are. What era did their musical tastes form? What characteristics make up your station’s “ideal” listener? What statistics can you crunch to better identify these listeners?
Jon Miller
By Jon Miller, Director of Programming Services. Arbitron Inc.
In my last article for this column I wrote about how to determine where the ratings opportunities lie in your market. I started with examining the playing field by looking at a number of different factors including total market listening and the makeup of your competitor’s audience.
Those are great starting points for orienting your station and building an audience, but I didn’t even begin to address your listeners themselves. You know, the people you hope are tuning into your radio station multiple times each day.
If you want to target your core audience effectively you need to know who they are, just as you need to know what the playing field in the market looks like. And I don’t mean simply that they are women between 18 and 34 years old, or men somewhere in the 29 year gap known as 25 to 54 year-olds.
You need to know what they do, where they go, what grabs their attention and what fuels their passion.
Of course this isn’t entirely possible because your audience is a diverse group of unique individuals. But you can narrow down the field to help you and your staff, communicate more effectively with the person that fits the description of who you want tuning in. Here are three ways you can go about this.
The Tender Years
Research has generally shown that most people cement their musical tastes during their teens and early 20’s; put another way, the high school and college days. After those years pass the majority of people’s musical direction involves swimming in the same pool and, for the most part, avoiding new sounds.
This doesn’t mean a new song or sound won’t grab their attention, and of course there are exceptions to this rule, particularly those who continue to search out and consume new music. But for the most part you can predict the center of a listener’s musical universe by doing some simple arithmetic. Go back to the charts and look at what was popular during those years and you’ll get a pretty good understanding of your target listener’s sensibilities.
Now, while I haven’t seen as much research on the subject, I believe the same holds true for other types of media. In his book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low-Culture Manifesto author Chuck Klosterman posits that the reason Generation X was such a moody, fatalistic group is that the defining movie of their generation was “The Empire Strikes Back,” which ends with the good guys all but defeated and the hero losing a hand while finding out his arch-nemesis is also his father.
While this may be a hyperbole, in a way Klosterman is on to something. For example, take comedy movies which are clearly generational. Ask a group of people in their mid-40’s or older to name their favorite comedies and you are likely to hear Animal House, Stripes, Caddyshack or the Blues Brothers. Shave ten years off of the person’s age and the answers are more likely to be Tommy Boy, Dumb and Dumber or any number of Adam Sandler movies (personally I stick with Dumb and Dumber because I’m in my early 30s).
So when you consider your target listener, start with how old they are now. Then go back in time to when they were between 16-24 years old and consider the biggest news stories, movies, television shows and other cultural influences that were likely to have imprinted on them during that time. Make sure your station is using appropriate cultural references and tripping the right emotional triggers to really engage them.
The Ideal Listener
Another good resource for finding ways to connect with your target listener involves using the people who interact with them the most (your airstaff) to build a picture of the ideal audience member.
To tap into your talent’s interactions with the audience try gathering them in a room and leading a discussion of what your absolutely ideal listener is all about. Try to really get into this person’s shoes. Talk about everything: their family situation, living arrangements, career path, daily routine, eating habits, hobbies, weekend activities, political affiliation, mode of transportation, wardrobe key possessions and anything else that will help narrow down who you are talking to. This is also a great place to incorporate what you’ve learned and gathered about your listeners through social media, email clubs, text campaigns and all the ways you interact with your audience. These are simply more ways to discern what they truly “like” whether that’s on Facebook or in the grocery store.
As you discuss what makes them tick make long lists of potential answers. Then vote on which answers are the most relevant narrowing down the scope until you have a detailed profile of what your core audience is really into. Once you’ve narrowed down the lists create a composite profile of the person (or people if your format equally targets men and women). Give the person a name, cut a picture out of a magazine that represents what they look like and post it in the studio as a reminder. Sure it’s a huge generalization but it certainly gives the staff a target to shoot for when they open the mic.
You should also use that composite when you coach your jocks. Instead of a subjective debate about whether content is on point, the composite combined with an understanding of the audience’s formative years gives you a pair of filters to test content against. And, by the way, share the information with the station’s sales team too. It gives them a better filter as well to use when prospecting for new clients or begging for an on-air promotion centered on one of their accounts. If it clearly doesn’t fit your target listener you have a stronger case to make for avoiding a potential ratings landmine.
Then Add Some Statistics
Finally, once you’ve delved into your target listener’s formative years and developed a composite profile of their life today, a final step would be to add some hard numbers to your perceptions. Many programmers have access to the Scarborough database which surveys consumers in the Top 75 markets chronicling their habits in everything from shopping to entertainment choices and many things in between.
Scarborough can help you determine just how likely your listeners are to be participating in a certain activity, eating at a certain restaurant or purchasing a particular model of car as well as how often they are likely to do any of those things. Use the numbers to round out the composite profile you’ve built of the station’s target listener. And if you’re brand new to Scarborough, a few write-ups of what it can do for you as a PD can be found here and here.
Keep in mind these exercises won’t tailor your station to each individual listener. But what they will do is help you find the sweet spot that will act as a guide for programming music and content that hits close to the center of the target more regularly. It will also help the entire staff orient their thinking in the right direction and when everyone is rowing the same way you are far more likely to have ratings success.
Follow the Arbitron Programming Services Team online at www.arbitrontraining.com/programming and on Twitter at @ArbProgramming.
