Richard Harker
by Richard Harker
Some athletic teams lose a game even before the game begins. They so question their ability, skill, and chance to win that the opposing team need only show up for victory to be theirs. The losing team has psyched itself out. The 2003 Detroit Tigers come to mind, and like the ’03 Tigers, radio seems to have psyched itself out. It believes it is doomed to fail.
Radio’s inferiority complex has been fueled by a nearly continuous barrage of punditry proclaiming the imminent death of radio at the hands of new media. Our self-loathing has reached such a point that we seem to feed on the criticism. Like sinners who embrace self-flagellation as a way to atone for our sins, we embrace those who bring us bad news. The negativity of our collective mind-set is so strong that bad news about radio is uncritically accepted and makes the headlines while good news is dismissed as misguided and inaccurate.
Take the frequently cited decline of TSL. The belief that people are listening less to radio is taken as an obvious fact that is accepted without debate or question. The most frequent source of this “fact” is Arbitron’s American Listening Trends. According to Arbitron, in the top 94 markets 12+ TSL declined 8.2% and 25-54 TSL declined 7.5% between 2000 and late 2006. (We don’t have more recent numbers because Arbitron ceased reporting national figures in 2007.)
The decline could have just as easily been reported this way: Despite rapid growth in a broad range of new media alternatives including satellite radio, Internet radio, Internet streaming, iPod and other media player ownership, and many other technological developments, commercial radio continues to command nearly 18 hours of listening per week, having only dropped an hour in the past six years. On top of that, the rate of decline has slowed. The greatest decline in TSL occurred years ago, before many of these new media alternatives had gained much attention. These statements are equally true, but they don’t fit with the image of a dying medium. They don’t serve the fear mongers and the new media hypsters.
And that assumes the decline is real. There may be methodological issues that explain the decline of TSL that have nothing to do with actual declines in listenership. There has been a significant growth in cell phone-only households, particularly among young households. It is estimated that perhaps a third of young households do not have a land-line telephone. That’s a problem for Arbitron because the company recruits participants by calling land-line telephone numbers. Until very recently, Arbitron did not have any cell-only households filling out diaries and the company still seriously under-represents cell phone households. It is probably no coincidence that during this time Arbitron has had an increasingly difficult time recruiting young participants. Could the decline in TSL be associated with recruitment problems and not an actual decline in listenership?
Over the years Arbitron has also loosened its rules regarding the rejection of diaries. Arbitron now accepts incomplete diaries it once rejected and now fills in some of the blank listening that used to be uncredited. One might assume that filling in the blanks would increase TSL, but sloppy diary keepers tend to listen to less radio than people who take the process seriously, so it might actually hurt rather than help TSL.
There are a whole host of cost-cutting changes that Arbitron has made over the recent past to compensate for declining cooperation rates. While book-to-book procedural changes might not significantly impact short term trends, the sum total raises questions about the consistency of Arbitron’s long term trends. While Arbitron will deny it, there’s no way that we can eliminate methodological changes as the real cause of the apparent decline in TSL. We simply cannot independently confirm that people are actually listening less to radio today. Yet we allow new media pundits to cite the declines over and over as proof that radio is doomed.
Just the fact that a rather small decline can inflict so much trauma on our collective psyche says a lot about radio’s state of mind. Newspapers are in a free-fall and it is likely some newspaper chains will fold before the end of the recession. Prime time network television viewership continues to contract. Compared to our old media brethren, radio is doing quite well, but we don’t act like it.
We seem to go out of our way to heap criticism on ourselves. A few years back, the National Association of Broadcasters assembled a panel of new media “gurus” for a session at the Radio Show. For an hour, our industry was lectured, criticized, and berated. The panelists declared that radio would be dead in a few years. Most of the companies these gurus represented just a few years ago don’t even exist anymore and probably didn’t make any money in the short time they did. Yet the NAB thought that it would be useful to have them tell broadcasters that we were a dying business.
A few years later, another “research” session consisted of video-tape excerpts of young listeners declaring to the camera that radio sucks and they never listen to it. This was solemnly presented as some sort of research proving that radio is in trouble. Young people today are very aware of how to act in front of a video camera. They understand how to play a role, and put in that position, they will say what they think they should say. So they say radio sucks. Does that really prove anything? Should this kind of thing be on the agenda of a radio convention?
Trade publications routinely report the musings of Wall Street analysts and allow them to explain to us what’s wrong with radio and how to fix it. In an article reported without irony, one analyst offered the observation that we weren’t doing enough to serve our P-1s. Yet that same analyst had previously urged companies to cut costs. The truth is that Wall Street analysts rarely have experience in the industries they cover. They churn out reports analyzing industries they barely understand, and always focus on things that “enhance stockholder value” an interesting euphemism that more often than not means screwing the customer. Despite that, their reports are covered (and unchallenged) as if there is some value in what they have to say.
A couple of recently released research studies illustrate how we reflexively respond to good and bad news. Paragon Media Research recently reported that young listeners were listening more to over-the-air radio. They wrote, “When we asked if 14-24 year-old respondents were listening to over-the-air radio ‘More’ or ‘Less’ than they had in the past, the listening ‘More’ won out by a healthy margin. There was a notable decline this year among respondents who ‘Never’ listen to radio and among those who listen ‘Less than an hour during a typical day’.”
The report was dutifully reported, but the disbelief that anyone (let alone young people) might actually be listening more to radio was palpable. Here’s how one radio pundit reported the news: “Listen, I want good news for radio as much as anybody else. But why are we making a conclusive statement of this type based on 400 expressed attitudes when Arbitron collects tens of thousands of actual listener behaviors every quarter? Answers of this type are notoriously unreliable in research – not so much because of the smallish sample but because the question asks for opinions of listening rather than an actual record of listening, which is what the diary and the PPM do.”
Recall that the decline of TSL was slowing when Arbitron discontinued the national report nearly two years ago. It is entirely reasonable that listeners might now realize that they are listening more to radio. Yet the only public comment about the study was disbelief. The irony of criticizing the findings is that this same pundit has frequently cited perceptual research to show how much people dislike radio and why alternative media were going to eat radio for lunch. So apparently as long as research findings are gloomy, they’re right, but if the results are upbeat, they aren’t reliable.
Another piece of research also made the news not too long ago. It declared radio had reached a “tipping point,” finding that for the first time more listeners reported using media players like iPods than reported listening to radio. Like all other research that pretends to have ominous implications for our industry, the findings were accepted without challenge or question.
The fact that this says nothing about the utility or value of radio apparently hasn’t occurred to anyone. Until recently, sales of media players had been growing exponentially, so the fact that large numbers of listeners were using players shouldn’t have come as a shock. However, declaring a tipping point suggests that there is some relationship between media player usage and radio that has negative implications for radio. That has not been established, and probably can’t be established. In fact, some circumstantial evidence suggests that media player usage is related to higher TSL, not lower. So this so called tipping point means nothing. However, clothed in our sack-cloth, we accept our daily flogging rather than rise up against yet another assertion that we suck.
Yes, radio revenue is down, but how much of that decline is of our own doing? How much of it is because we’ve allowed ourselves to be psyched out by the competition? A June 18th New York Times article reported that traditional media turns out be to a good way to sell things. In an article entitled, “Traditional Media Not Dead Yet For Marketing,” Stuart Elliott writes, “A Yankelovich study finds that advertisements appearing in traditional media like television (and radio) are still ‘much more likely’ to have made a positive impression with consumers than ads running in digital media. A principal reason for those results, said J. Walker Smith, President at the Yankelovich Monitor Division of Yankelovich in Atlanta, was that for ads that made an impression, consumers using traditional media were in a more positive mood and more likely to be interested in entertainment and relaxation.” So traditional media (like radio) that entertain create a more positive impression. Have you seen anyone in radio sales run with this news?
Like any struggling team, radio needs a strong coach — somebody that is going to kick it in the butt. Radio desperately needs some strong leadership. Unfortunately, it isn’t clear where that leadership is going to come from. The big public companies are more concerned with Wall Street than leading radio out of this funk. The NAB has given us Radio 2020, a campaign that will do for radio what the Edsel did for Ford. The RAB seems shell-shocked. Arbitron is more concerned with selling us PPM than helping us sell radio to listeners and advertisers.
People like Dan Mason and Bob Neil are doing their best to kick radio in the butt, but it is going to take more than a handful of people to turn around this defeatism. Radio needs people who believe in radio, people who see through new media’s hype and BS. Yes, consolidation has hurt. Yes, budget cuts and downsizing has hurt. These are difficult times for radio, but it is time we got over these things. It is time to rediscover a sense of pride and a confidence that radio can still excite and move people. Say something good about radio today — and mean it!
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.
