PROGRAMMING TO WIN: “The World According to PPM”

According to Mike McVay, PPM are the three letters that are “striking fear in programmers these days.” In his column this week, McVay compiles an extensive list of lessons learned from PPM so far. While McVay cautions that “NOTHING IS FOR SURE” about the new PPM world yet, there are still many useful tips and reminders and concepts that can and should be applied by programmers.

by Mike McVay, President of McVay Media and McVay Syndication

Mike McVay

The three letters of ratings that seem to be striking fear in programmers these days isn’t TSL or AQH but rather PPM. The three letters that stands for the Arbitron (USA) and BBM (Canada) Personal People Meter has captured the attention and “gray matter” of programmers across North America. There is always fear of the unknown. Pressure fosters in an atmosphere of fear. The Hall of Fame football coach for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Chuck Knoll, once said “Pressure is what you feel when you don’t know what’s going on.” It is exactly that type of “pressure” that I’m trying to relieve for you by answering the question of “what’s going on.”
            Because our livelihood as programmers and talent is dependent upon rating success, I have committed myself to learning as much as possible about PPM through hours and hours of self-education, time spent with representatives from Arbitron like Gary Marince and Ron Rodrigues and by visiting industry legends and successes like WBEB/Philadelphia owner Jerry Lee. McVay Media SVP/Consulting Charlie Cook (and one of the founders of our consultancy) taught me a lot about the execution of the People Meter as he mastered PPM programming techniques while consulting client stations in Los Angeles.
            Arbitron hosts a consultant fly-in twice a year. Several years ago Arbitron invited McVay New Media President Daniel Anstandig and I to represent the format of AC at the “fly-in.” They gave us the keys to look under-the-hood of the AC format’s performance in Houston and in Philadelphia. The experience was eye-opening. We learned a lot about how AC performs in PPM markets, but we also learned a lot about PPM in general.
            I can assure you that only one thing is for sure … and that is … NOTHING IS FOR SURE. Despite all of the homework that we’re doing, and no matter what anyone tells you, we’re all still learning about the People Meter. We’re learning the many ways in which listeners use radio and that’s because of the Personal People Meter. We’re also learning how effective the system is or isn’t, what is measurable market-to-market and what the seemingly successful practices are for maximizing your ratings in a PPM market.
            There is no “carved in stone” policy for increased performance in PPM markets. There are only “trials” that are being executed and monitored. Some will argue with my suggestions and even others will claim to have all of the answers on how to maximize the PPM. The answer is simple … get more listeners than anyone else! There is the answer. Now you have it. Getting the most listeners is more likely if you employ the practices that we believe are showing the most promise in mastering trends and enhancing performances in a PPM world.

            These are the key points:

• The panel of participants will change as respondents “drop out.” Listeners “quit” whenever they’re tired of participating … or they are retired after 24 months. Changes take place at the start of a month.
• Everything in the PPM world applies to the diary world. The people meter is measuring what people listen to … and this is a form of research that can be applied to PPM and diary markets, both. If listeners like it in a PPM market … the odds are that they’ll like it in a diary market.
• Everything in the PPM world applies to the diary world. Except for spot placement. That is because of how Arbitron measures a quarter hour in a diary market versus a PPM market. In a diary market you need five continuous minutes of listening inside of a quarter hour in order to get credit for a full quarter hour. In the PPM market you still need to have five minutes of listening inside of a quarter hour, but they do not need to be continuous minutes. You can have five individual minutes and you’ll get credit for the quarter hour. Salvage wasted minutes of listening by expanding the music time inside of each quarter hour.
• Because of the rule-of-measurement (aforementioned) diary markets should continue to keep their stop-sets in the middle of a quarter hour ala the 20 and 50 positions in an hour. The PPM markets should straddle the quarter hours. You want to cover the greatest part of each quarter hour with music. Stop from :13 – :18 and :43 – :48 or do the same thing by straddling the top of the hour. It doesn’t matter how big your PPM ratings are … they will increase if you straddle the quarter hours.
• Master each quarter hour – the clock resets each quarter hour and every 15 minute segment on your station should be a representative snapshot of the format.
• A strong and desired “position” is necessary for ratings success.  Your “position” is important! Trout & Ries wrote books and articles about positioning. The value of positioning continues to be exceptionally important. The stations that are most clearly defined and well positioned tend to be the ones that do the best in the ratings for both diary and PPM markets.
• Cume and TSL remain essential. Some PPM programmers believe that it’s all about cume. In most situations you need both to be truly dominant. Despite what your wife or girlfriend may have told you … BIGGER IS BETTER.
• “Duration” and “occasions” drive TSL. That is the way to build Time Spent Listening is by having the audience come back over-and-over. Listen to Mike & Mike on ESPN and you’ll hear Mike Greenberg continually recycle the audience and encourage repeat tune-in. Sean Hannity does a great job of this, too. John Tesh is a master at teasing the audience and then delivering a pay-off that creates fear that if you don’t listen, you’ll miss something.
• Repeat tune-in drives TSL. It’s not how long. It’s how often. If the average listener only tunes-in for three minutes at a time … bring them back as often as possible so that you capture the entire quarter hour. Five individual minutes get you a quarter hour.
• People leave the station “on our cue.” Do not tip-off the audience that commercials are coming. They’ll listen deeper into a stop-set if you avoid clichés like “We’ll be right back…” Don’t telegraph stop-sets by having a set system in which you always initiate a commercial break. Make the way in which you enter a break as unpredictable as possible.
• Prioritize your commercials so that those that sound most like music air first in a stop-set. This is a policy that went away when traffic systems made it nearly impossible to air music sounding commercials first. Music based advertisements should air first followed by the longest to shortest duration commercials.
• Consider a “dead roll” into stop-sets. If you’re in a PPM market … experiment with one of your two breaks by rolling straight from music into the commercial cluster.
• “Boxcar” the segueing of music … meaning play music-to-music. Keep in mind that speaking over an outro of a song means “commercials are coming.”
• Play as few commercial breaks as possible inside of an hour. Two breaks are better than three or four breaks. Forget the research that said “listeners want shorter commercial breaks instead of longer breaks.” What they want is more continuous music with fewer commercial interruptions.
• Does your station have a leadership position in the mind of the listeners? The station that’s known as the #1 Country station, the #1 Rock station, the #1 News station, etc, performs better in the PPM as these are generally bigger cume based radio stations. I repeat from an earlier point … BIGGER IS BETTER.
• Do people know who the station is for? Like people of like tastes like the same radio station. The old adage “birds of a feather flock together” is appropriately applied here.
• Do people know how to use the station? This could be a double-edged sword. For instance a Christian AC (CCM) station may be clearly known as “the station you listen to when you want to hear Contemporary Christian Music.” The bad news may be that the only time you’re in the mood for that music is Sunday morning as you drive to church.
• Position is ¾ of the battle and execution is ¼ of the battle. Be known for something and then do it better than anyone else. If you’re a Rock station and another station in town owns the position of Denver’s Rock Station, it is difficult to beat them, even if you’re better programmed. You need a “nuclear weapon” to move audiences. PPM is not about perceived listening. It’s about real listening.
• Daily ratings are more important than weekly ratings … because the week is made up of seven individual days. Focus on winning individual days. Look at your competition and you’ll see that they, as well as your station, perform better on some days versus others. This is an area for growth among those stations that are already dominant.
• Super heavy users are more important than P1s. We’ve spent the last several years focusing on the Preference 1 listeners for our stations, but if you as a P1 listen to WXXX for ten hours a week and I as a P2 listen to WXXX for 20 hours a week, I’m more valuable than you are to that station. Most music stations need at least 60% of their audience to be made up of heavy listeners in order to be successful. This is very true for AC and Country. 20% of your listening should come from the “moderate” bucket.
• Tactical contests like the “Cash Clock” and “Work and Win Payday” contests have a positive impact on the ratings because they encourage repeat tune-in. Keep them coming back hour after hour. It’s easier to do that than to try to force an individual to change their daily habits.
• Run your “power songs” at the audience recovery point (or your best talk content) so that the audience is entertained and they’re thus encouraged to repeat tune-in. Recovery time is that point at which an exited listener re-enters the station. Example; your stop-set is only six minutes long, but the average listener who leaves a station goes away for ten minutes, so whatever you do immediately after the stop-set falls on deaf ears. Move the biggest hit song or that monster news story/interview to three or four minutes after the stop-set concludes.
• Do not waste a killer song right before a stop-set.  However, a great talk break should go before a stop-set.
• Features and special shows should sound as if they belong on your radio station. New Music stations should reconsider that forgotten lunch feature. “Wasted” features and content that air at the quarter hours are of no value.
• Keep the station name and frequency high profile. Some very large broadcast companies made an initial assumption that because the People Meter will measure what’s heard, you need not ID the station frequently, and that promos and imaging elements were to be eliminated. 
• Continuing “brand management” is important. Gary Marince of Arbitron shared a splendid analogy with me that clarifies why it’s important to continue to brand your station. A 12-pack of Coca-Cola is wrapped in a brilliant red cardboard box that features the logo, a positioning statement and the benefits of the beverage. When you buy the box and take it home, Coke continues to position and brand their product even though you’ve already made your purchase. Think how much money Coke could save if the cans inside the box were unpainted and unstamped aluminum? They’d annually save hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide. They paint the cans, regardless of the fact that you’ve already purchased the box, because they want you to know what the beverage is that you’re enjoying and experiencing. They want you to come back and buy Coke again.
• Avoid the superstitions of PPM ala, “PPM hates talk,” not true!  PPM is a device that monitors the listening habits of a select panel of PPM households. People are telling us what they like and what they dislike. How hard is it to figure out that doing more of what they like will increase your ratings? By the way … I can show you programs on some stations where talk is as valuable as the music they play.
• All small cume – big TSL formats … will perform less well in PPM due to the sample size for the service in most markets. A funny thing happens to niche formats in PPM markets. They get niche ratings.
• Avoid airing a “Best of” program on your station. You can present a “Best of” but don’t use those exact words on the air. You are not required by the FCC to use the words Best Of, Reprise Performance or anything else that screams the words “we’re not here … this is a stale show that we aired awhile ago.” The same goes for allowing talent to say “Sitting in for…” No one wants to listen to Rush Limbaugh’s Show when Rush isn’t there. No substitutes allowed.
• Taking vacation during a traditional Monday-Friday week actually impacts two weeks. That’s because the rating week starts on a Thursday and ends on a Wednesday. Encourage your talent to take off Thursday-Wednesday. If that violates your senses … then ask them to VT select days and simulate a live performance during their absence.
• The PPM detects what radio a listener can hear…including in-store. If your station goes off the air due to technical problems … listening stops immediately with a PPM monitor. Once a station goes off the air … recovery time is extensive. We’re still learning what the exact impact is, but it can be days of lost listening, even if the station does return to the airwaves. You cannot depend on reported listening with the PPM.
• Spoken word (N/T) stations hold listeners through stop-sets better than music stations. This is because there is information incorporated inside of stop-sets, too.
• Most stations lose 20% of their audience going into a stop-set vs. the claim of several national listening studies claims of only 8% tune-out. However, very few of us ever believed that 80% of an audience sits through the commercials. The People Meter suggests that the majority of the audience will sit through the commercial break. This warrants an investment in your stations production department in both people and equipment.
• Daily cume is up in PPM markets and that has impacted TSL by driving it down. More listeners decrease the average for the length of time that a listener uses the station. This is another fact that underscores building TSL via repeat tune-in.
• Important; the performance and content of the air talent becomes more important and relevant in a PPM world. Talent is more important than ever. They must be better prepared than ever. They must be consistently more entertaining. They need to be able to get to the point. Radio personalities must learn the lost art of the two-sentence interview and the eight-second entertainment break. I’m exaggerating … but not by much.
• Track the changes that you make so that you can ascertain what works and what doesn’t. Do not make multiple significant changes at the same time. You’ll be unable to fully dissect which worked and which didn’t work. Monitor significant changes one item at a time and prioritize the changes so as to learn for yourself what will work in your market and what won’t.

            Do you disagree with these suggestions? There are surely some that you question. The great thing about having the People Meter in your market is that you can test these suggestions. You’ll know fairly quickly what works and what doesn’t work. If you’re in a diary market, then many of these suggestions are still applicable, but your ability to track their impact will be slower to gauge. The one constant that remains through all of my suggestions is that BIGGER IS BETTER. Sun Tzu wrote in “The Art of War” that “When the elephants fight … it is the ants that lose.” Be an elephant! 

Mike McVay is President of McVay Media and McVay Syndication. His firm consults radio stations on programming, coaches various air-talent, consults music and media artists and performers, syndicates The Donny Osmond Radio Show and consults The John Tesh Show. The firm is associated with the Internet programming and sales consultancy McVay New Media as well as a partner in Listener Driven Radio. Contact Mike at mike@mcvaymedia.com. Visit www.mcvaymedia.com to learn more about McVay Media.