For this week’s Programming To Win column, Richard Harker takes a closer look at the importance of listening “occasions” in Arbitron’s PPM data. Harker breaks down PPM numbers to deduce if more listening occasions are truly more important than increasing Time Spent Listening.
By Richard Harker
Richard Harker
“To trace something unknown back to something known is gratifying and gives one a feeling of power. Any explanation is better than none!” Friedrich Nietzsche
It turns out that Nietzsche was on to something. Behavioral psychologists have now found that we get a jolt of chemically induced satisfaction when we figure something out.
Our brain actually releases dopamine, a chemical that helps us feel good about ourselves.
The fact that what we “know” may be wrong or even unknowable is irrelevant.
Just thinking we’ve figured something out gives us a rush of pleasure.
A shot of dopamine. Maybe that’s why programmers are always trying to figure out the secrets behind Arbitron ratings.
When Arbitron released its Key Indicators of Highly Rated PPM Stations in 2011, the dopamine must have been flowing like champagne on New Year’s Eve.
With the claim that No One Wants to Be Average, the document revealed the secrets of becoming a top performer in PPM.
And what did the report say? What was the secret to winning?
Forget about listening spans, try to get people to listen longer. Now it’s all about Occasions.
Arbitron declared: Getting people to listen longer was Old School. New School is to get people to listen more often.
The revelation ricocheted around radio. Appointment radio was the new buzz word. Give listeners reasons to come back time and time again. That’s the secret!
Stories were written, convention sessions convened. Seminars held.
Today, the importance of Occasions and the unimportance of listening spans are taken as fact. Nietzsche’s unknown has become known.
But while programmers “know” this, is it really true?
We recently collaborated with a client in an analysis to better understand the relationship between occasions and listening spans.
The Arbitron study looked at formats across markets, but our client just wanted to better understand Occasions and listening spans in their market.
Three graphs tell the story.
The first graph shows the relationship between share and listening spans, what Arbitron calls Time per Occasion (TpO). Each square represents a station.
Share is shown on the vertical axis. The larger the station’s share, the higher the square appears on the graph.
Time per Occasion is shown along the horizontal axis. Stations shown toward the right have higher TpO, while stations toward the left have lower TpO. The actual numbers are irrelevant; it is the direction of the numbers, the pattern that matters.
Notice that nearly all the stations are stacked in two columns. The two columns represent 9 and 10 minute listening spans. It indicates that over 80% of the stations in this market have listening spans within a minute of each other.
Quite a coincidence!
In fact Arbitron found that the average listening spans for pretty much every station in every format were the same, either 9 or 10 minutes each occasion.
When revealed, the virtually identical listening spans of every format from Classic Rock and AC to CHR, Country, and All News ought to have raised a few eyebrows, but that’s what Arbitron says.
This is the basis for Arbitron’s assertion that listening spans don’t matter.
If listeners to every station in every format across all 48 markets listen the same length of time, then Time per Occasion is irrelevant. Forgetaboutit!
The second graph shows the relationship between share and Occasions.
If the number of Occasions is the key to ratings success we should see stations arranged in a sort of diagonal cloud moving from lower left to upper right.
The stations with few occasions would have smaller shares and appear in the lower left. Stations with more occasions would have larger shares and appear towards the upper right.
But we don’t see that. Stations are all over the place.
Some poorly rated stations have many more Occasions than much higher rated station. And some highly rated stations have very few Occasions. Our client concluded that increasing Occasions wasn’t the answer.
But if you still believe that increasing Occasions is the key to ratings success, do a similar analysis for your market.
After all, you’re competing against the other stations in your market, not similarly formatted stations in the other 47 PPM markets.
And a closer look at Arbitron’s national data raises doubts about whether the relationship holds even when we average two thousand stations and ten formats.
Without getting too caught up in the technical details, a ranker of shares follows what’s called a power curve. Many stations lead lives of quiet desperation with no hope of becoming competitive, let alone a top performer.
Either they are poorly funded, have an impaired signal, or have some other issue that dooms them to a life towards the bottom of a ranker.
Averaging these stations along with full-signal competitive stations distorts what’s happening towards the top of the rankers.
Fortunately the Arbitron study includes a comparison between the top three performers and the top performers. This is a much more realistic comparison, and it tells a very different story than the headlines suggest.
There is virtually no difference between the top three performers and the Alpha-Dog on top for either Occasions or Time per Occasion.
Think about that for a moment. What that means is that if your station is one of the top three performers in a format, there is no evidence that growing occasions will grow your share. You won’t beat the Big Dog that way.
So much for appointment radio.
Then how do you grow share? What’s the secret?
The answer can be found in the third graph.
The graph shows the relationship between share and daily cume. As with the other two graphs, share is shown vertically, while cume is shown along the bottom.
Notice that unlike the other two graphs, the cloud of stations cluster around a diagonal line. Small cume stations also have small shares, and stations with larger cumes have larger shares.
Things get a little strange towards the top, but in this market ethnic FMs and heritage AM stations distort the relationship at the upper end.
So here’s the real deal: With PPM, the only reliable sure-fire way to grow share is to grow cume.
To Arbitron’s credit, their analysis does mention daily cume as a key driver, but somehow that got buried in the excitement over Occasions.
Maybe we should blame the distortion on Nietzsche and dopamine.
You can’t get much of a rush finding out that to grow share you need more listeners. Everybody knows that.
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.
