For Arbitron’s first Programming To Win contribution of the New Year, Jon Miller gives a preview of upcoming topics the ratings giant will be focusing on in 2013. Arbitron will be teaching programmers even more about how to analyze PPM ratings books, as well as how to assess the competition’s ratings vs. your own.
Jon Miller
By Jon Miller
Happy New Year from the Arbitron Programming Services Team! We hope that 2013 is a successful year for your station .
If you’ve been reading our contributions to this column over the past 12 months you’ve hopefully learned about how to get the most out of the Arbitron data your stations receives through our entries on topics including what to look at each time a book comes in, evaluating programming benchmarks, surveying the competitive landscape, how to talk to your air staff and your sales team about the numbers and, finally, what it takes to make the move from a diary market to PPM.
Now, as we roll into 2013, we’re excited to announce the debut of the first two entries in a new series of free, 45-minute online training courses designed specifically for programmers. The first two releases focus on programming in PPM markets (we’ll be adding two for diary markets soon) and can teach you more about how to apply the practices we’ve written about in the past year.
Here’s a preview of what you can expect to see and learn from the first two entries in our new programming curriculum:
Class #1 – How to Break out a Book (PPM)
Each month when the PPM ratings come out, it can seem like there is a fire hose of information pointed directly at your desk. Daily estimates, panel change, P1 metrics, turnover, M Score and on and on. There are not enough hours in the day to analyze every single bit of data gathered about your listeners during a given month so our first class provides a checklist of six things that are important to monitor each month, why they matter, and what order to run them in.
Daily Estimates: In PPM, unlike Diary, we base all of the Average Quarter-Hour (AQH) numbers, including your Share, on the Daily Estimates. Daily Cume and Daily Time Spent Listening (TSL) are the periodic elements of the ratings table in a PPM market. Therefore, it’s vital to look at these numbers every single time.
P1 Audience: This one is pretty straightforward. You need to keep tabs on your most important customers at all times. For top-ranked stations, P1 listeners account for only 40% of a station’s total cume, but 60% of total AQH ratings. They are your core constituents.
Hour by Hour: By digging a little bit deeper into standard dayparts, you’ll be able to identify strengths and weaknesses for your station across the course of the day. For example, most PPM markets peak between 3pm and 5pm for total market listening. Does your station follow this trend?
Total Market Listening: After looking at your station’s hourly performance, check out how the market as a whole uses radio over the course of the day. Understand where the peaks and valleys of listening are and then compare your station’s audience trend. There may be areas of opportunity where the market listening is peaking but your station is not.
Audience Sharing: The habits of your listeners can change rapidly as market trends, seasonality, music cycles and a thousand other factors influence people’s daily media choices. By tracking not just where else your listeners tune to but how long they do so and how many times they do it each day, you’ll be able to identify exactly who your competitors really are and gauge the impact they are having on your ratings.
Panel Change: Once you’ve accounted for all of the factors that influence listening habits, it’s important to find out if the normal monthly changes in the PPM respondent panel had any impact. Arbitron’s panel change report is the one place that can answer the question, “Was it something I did or something with the panel this month?” Many times, the answer is a little bit of both.
Those six items should be at the top of your list every time a new book comes out. Once you’ve reviewed them, the class will conclude by talking about HOW to pull the numbers and why different approaches each yield valuable insights.
Class #2 – Analyzing The Competition (PPM)
Once you’ve mastered what to look at each book (and why, and how) it’s time to turn your attention to your competitors. Our second class will teach you how to identify who your true competitors are, how to profile your audience as opposed to theirs, how to use market-level listening trends for insights and then how to set realistic goals for what you want to accomplish.
Who is the competition, really? All PDs can list who their direct competitors are: the stations you go head-to-head with for content, music or personalities. But there are often other stations that compete for your listeners’ attention that may not be as immediately obvious. Going beyond just a simple ranker in your core demo can help you identify other stations you need to be thinking about when you program.
Start by examining audience sharing data (which we conveniently cover in class #1) to find out not just how many listeners are sharing time with other stations, but how long and how often. You may be surprised to see who else shows up on the list.
Profiling your audience, and theirs. Once you’ve identified which stations to watch, try creating an audience profile that goes deeper than just the basics such as gender and ethnicity. To really understand who powers your ratings and how those people differ from your competitors, you need to dig deeper into Scarborough qualitative data to find out what their lifestyle entails. If you’re unfamiliar with Scarborough Research, read our past series on why this information is useful for PDs, and how to pull it.
Market level information. Just as we extol the virtues of looking at top-line market information when breaking out a book, try doing the same for your competitors. By tracking the market as a whole inside your core demo, you can put context around your station’s performance and how it relates to your competition. What does the 18-34 radio listening pie look like in your market this month? Is seasonality playing a part in lifting all boats of a similar format?
Set Realistic Goals. Finally, once you’ve scrutinized the competitive landscape, it’s time to set ratings goals for your station. For achievable goals that lead to results you need to understand what’s realistic and what it will take to get there. Arbitron’s “Rank and Share Goals” report in PD Advantage Web can help you analyze where your station stands with key metrics that drive ratings success like daily cume and daily listening occasions and illustrate exactly what you need to add in each to climb the ranker.
Our hope is that you’ll finish this class armed with the knowledge of how to properly identify and profile your competition, by taking advantage of some key reports and features of the Arbitron software. The class will conclude by recapping where exactly you can find the information inside our programming software.
If you’re interested in signing up for our new programming curriculum, simply visit the links below. Remember, these classes are free and are offered online with live instructors (often me), and should each last about 45 minutes. All you need to sign up is an email address and confirmation that your station subscribes to the Arbitron ratings.
We hope to see you soon in our virtual classroom!
How to Break Out a Book: http://bit.ly/X3ir4d
Analyzing the Competition: http://bit.ly/X3iH31
Follow the Arbitron Programming Services Team online at www.arbitrontraining.com/programming and on Twitter at @ArbProgramming.
