In this week’s Programming To Win column, Richard Harker focuses on the importance of cume as the key element of a station’s PPM ratings. Harker digs into Arbitron data to show that cume, not TSL, should be the focus of your plan for ratings growth.
Richard Harker
By Richard Harker
James Carville helped elect Bill Clinton by hanging a sign in Clinton’s campaign headquarters that read: THE ECONOMY, STUPID.
It was Carville’s way to keep everyone focused on the key to winning.
If it worked for Clinton, maybe it can work for you. Hang a sign behind your desk that reads: IT’S ALL ABOUT CUME, STUPID.
The biggest persistent urban legend about PPM is that the key to winning is increasing Occasions. Increase Occasions, get listeners to come back more often, and ratings will grow.
It is simply not true.
The truth is that share growth is fueled almost entirely by Cume growth.
Not TSL.
Not Occasions
Not Time per Occasion.
It’s Cume growth that drives share.
And don’t trust me. Arbitron’s own analyses provide overwhelming evidence that winning in a PPM market is all about Cume.
Take a look at a table from Arbitron’s Key Indicators of Highly Rated PPM Stations.
It calculates average metrics for over two thousand stations across all 48 PPM markets comparing number one stations to other stations.
The important comparison from a competitive standpoint is between number one stations to the top 3 stations. It tells you what you need to understand in a competitive situation.
According to Arbitron, the top dogs have a 10.4% Cume advantage over their weaker peers.
Contrast that advantage to the lack of differences in other metrics like Occasions.
The top dogs have virtually no advantage over the competition in Daily TSL (1:12 versus 1:11), Daily Occasions (5.3 versus 5.2), or Time per Occasion (10 minutes for both).
Another way to look at this is that over 80% of the big dog share lead comes from Cume. Stations with over 10% higher Cume end up with 12% higher share.
In other words, number one stations have a lot more listeners than their competitors.
What this means is that trying to close the gap to your competitor by focusing on increasing TSL isn’t going to work. Even if you match your competitor’s TSL, you will not close the share gap by even a tenth of a share.
Unless you grow cume, all the efforts to increase TSL will fail to impact share.
The Arbitron analysis was first done in 2010 and repeated in 2011, and both produced similar results.
Then at last year’s Conclave Arbitron updated its analysis, once again comparing average, top three, and top stations.
Once again Daily Cume was by far the biggest difference between number one stations and their competitors.
And once again Arbitron confirmed the relative unimportance of TSL for PPM. Number one stations had the same Time per Occasion, and only one-half occasion per day more.
For this year’s Country Radio Seminar Arbitron analyzed 15 markets comparing Country leaders to their followers.
As you might guess, the only significant difference between leaders and followers was Cume. Country leaders have 32% more cume listeners.
Daily Occasions are a statistic tie (5.2 versus 4.7).
Analysis after analysis shows that PPM is all about Cume. If you want to beat the competition, you need to have more listeners than they do.
Arbitron’s analyses provide great insights across markets, but you don’t compete with stations in other markets. You compete with other stations in your own market.
That’s why Harker Research approached the issue of Cume versus TSL from a different perspective. We looked at station performance in individual markets.
We compared Cume, Daily Occasions, and other metrics for all stations plotting share against the other metrics.
The next two graphs illustrate what we found out.
Each station is represented by a square. Share is shown vertically. The better ranked stations show up towards the top of the graph while the lower ranked stations are towards the bottom.
The first graph shows the relationship between share and Cume.
Notice that the stations roughly trace out a diagonal line rising across the page.
This tells us that as Cume grows, so does share. Higher ranked stations have more Cume.
(Things get a little wonky towards the upper right because number one stations across formats tend to have different profiles.)
The pattern is clear. Stations with higher Cume generally have higher shares.
We refer to that as a strong correlation between success and Cume listeners. More Cume translates into more AQH.
Compare the strong relationship between Cume and share to Occasions shown in the next graph.
If the urban legend that Occasions is the key to winning were true, we would see the same pattern that we see with Cume, a gradually increasing diagonal line moving from lower left to upper right.
Stations with smaller shares would tend to have fewer occasions and would appear in the lower left, while stations with larger shares would have more occasions and appear in the upper right.
We don’t see that.
Stations are all over the place. Stations with similar Occasions have wildly different shares.
Some poorly rated stations have many more Occasions than much higher rated station. And some highly rated stations have relatively few Occasions.
The conclusion is incontrovertible: TSL, and its components of Occasions and Time per Occasions have very little impact on share.
The key difference between market leaders and their competitors is Cume. If you want to win, you need more listeners than the other guys.
Does that mean appointment listening is worthless, that efforts to recycle listeners don’t work?
Perhaps if you are a top ranked station with one of the market’s biggest Cumes, then TSL might matter. It might have a fraction of the impact that growing Cume has, but there are a finite number of people that can listen to you.
Once you max out your Cume (a rare event in competitive markets), you might as well try to eke out what you can by increasing Occasions–even if there is little chance that you will meaningfully increase share.
If you are a challenger, you have to focus on the one thing that will close the gap to the leader, and that is Cume. You need to grow the size of your audience until it approaches the leader’s.
If you are a Program Director, the notion that quarter-hour maintenance, appointment listening, and similar tricks of the trade have limited benefit may be unsettling.
As a PD, these are the things we’ve always done. And they remain important in diary markets.
The problem is that in PPM markets Arbitron no longer measures listening. It now measures drive-by exposure.
That’s a major paradigm shift that has a profound impact on the best way for PPM market Program Directors to grow share.
It is a paradigm shift that requires that today we focus on reaching out to new listeners and creating big-tent formats.
And no matter how hard you work to create a great sounding station, Arbitron will tell you that your listeners spend only ten minutes at a time listening.
Richard Harker is President of Harker Research, a company providing a wide range of research services to radio stations in North America and Europe. Twenty-years of research experience combined with Richard’s 15 years as a programmer and general manager helps Harker Research provide practical actionable solutions to ratings problems. Visit www.harkerresearch or contact Richard at (919) 954-8300
