Pat Welsh
By Pat Welsh
With the restart of the PPM in New York, Chicago, LA and Riverside – San Bernardino, now is a good time to review what we know about the PPM results and how it should affect programming tactics.
Before getting into specifics, there are a couple of things to consider about this topic. First, even with the controversies over the 18-34 sampling problems, minority participation, EMRC accreditation and more, the PPM has some interesting things to tell us about how listeners really use the radio. Second, devising programming tactics that are more PPM friendly should be done regardless of how soon your market is scheduled to make the conversion. Think of this as the world’s largest research project, and take advantage of the lessons learned from markets that have already made the conversion.
Cume Again
By now, I’m sure you know that cumes are substantially larger, especially for many music formats. But the magnitude of those increases can be breathtaking; cumes often increase by a factor of 2:1 or 3:1 because there isn’t any more phantom cume (lost listening). The big problem is that TSL (now called AWTE, for “Average Weekly Time Exposed”) is substantially lower. But, paradoxically, we find that people listen more times during the week in the PPM, but each listening occasion is a fraction of the time that the diary indicated.
This has led to a lot of discussions about what’s more important: cume or TSL. In fact, the most important thing now is TSL. The cume increase is a given, but holding onto those listeners isn’t. Trying to maximize P-1 listening is still essential. Creating more listening occasions for your most loyal listeners is still the quickest way to build larger quarter hour numbers along with getting some of those causal listeners to become part of your core.
On the latter point, one of the emerging stories of the PPM reality is that P-1 is a flexible concept. Since panelists may participate for up to two years (instead of keeping a diary for one week), we will get to see how P-1 status evolves over time. Many people are likely to change their P-1 station, some more than once. Over time, we’ll get a better sense for what percentage stays loyal and what percentage is susceptible to changing.
Top of Mind Still Counts For A Lot
There are those who say you don’t have to ID or promote the station as much as before. Without phantom cume, the thinking goes, you don’t have to worry about lost listening. I disagree. Lost listening isn’t the point behind top-of-mind awareness. The real point behind promoting the station often and increasing top-of-mind awareness is to build the brand and make people choose your station first over any of the competitors.
From that perspective, selling the benefits and reminding people why they choose your station is still critical. In fact, with listening occasions being shorter, you should promote things even more often. The trick is to make things shorter and to the point. Don’t waste anyone’s time with lots of clutter and superfluous details. Tell your listeners why they should care and direct them to your Web site for all the minutiae. Break up the information into bite size chunks. Each version of the promo can focus on a different angle of a promotion or event.
This is the perfect example of a tactic that can be implemented immediately, regardless of whether your market is currently using the PPM. The fact is that listeners aren’t hearing your promos and liners as often as you think. As for simply identifying the station, the consensus is that a few song-to-song segues may keep the stations sounding cleaner, but the trick is to make the IDs that you do run more memorable.
It’s A Man’s World
On average, 30% more men than women are listening to the radio in the PPM. This is a stunning reversal of the conventional wisdom that more women listen than men. This finding has been consistent across all markets using the PPM, which accounts for the big increase in shares for male-based formats like Rock.
What’s interesting is that difference isn’t something innate with the sexes; rather, the difference has to do with employment. People who are employed full-time listen to a lot more radio; the ones who aren’t watch more television. And more men are employed full-time than women. When it comes to comparing just the men and women who are employed full-time (or just those who are not), the listening levels are the same.
30% Off Everything On The Dial
Depending on the market, listening (Persons Using Radio) is 25-30% lower with the PPM than it was in the diary. That means that, at any given moment, there are 25-30% fewer people listening to the radio than the diary indicated. This is the most important finding from the PPM conversion. It has serious implications for sales and will force the entire industry to reorient its way of thinking. Already, new sales philosophies are starting to emerge, including talk about giving up front guarantees on audience size, like television does.
Still, the fact that radio cumes go up so much has created a new dynamic for radio as a reach medium. Data from each PPM market shows that a number of stations in each have a larger reach than the leading local daily newspaper. Radio’s reach is on a par with a prime time television show.
The Sampling Problems Are Even Worse With PPM
The major controversies about PPM have to do with awful sampling of 18-34s. The situation is improving, but if you’ve ever complained about 18-34 proportionality with diaries, you’re going to hate the PPM. One caution about the “improvements’ in 18-34 sampling over the past few months is that Arbitron has set the bar pretty low. Their DDI (Designated Delivery Index) goals, which shows how close they are to reaching proportionality, are much lower for 18-34’s than for the total 6+ sample. So, while the numbers are on the way up and Arbitron presentations shows them over delivering on their guarantee, the 18-34 sampling is still a big problem.
By the way, the PPM sample, unlike the diary’s, includes cell phone only households. It’s a good thing that Arbitron decided to include these people (proportionately young) as they put together their PPM panels. Otherwise, there’s no telling how bad the 18-34 sample might be.
More Is Less
The new methodology comes with a dramatic increase in the amount of data being collected. In fact, the initial data downloads for the PPM markets were so massive that the software analysis tools could barely handle it (they’ve since been updated and upgraded). The point is that there is so much information available that we don’t really know what we’re looking at yet. We may see tune in and tune out for our stations, but what’s a good number and what’s a bad number? How can we use this information to make decisions on individual songs? Those are topics for future columns.
Pat Welsh, Senior Vice President/Digital Content, Pollack Media Group, can be reached at 310 459-8556, fax: 310-459-8556, or at pat@pollackmedia.com.
