They Love Our Commercials! Yeah, Right!

As a programmer who has focused on research for over 30 years, I'm still amazed at how it can be misused, misinterpreted, and just generally screwed up.

Recently, Arbitron and Coleman Research released some information about commercial tune-out. I'm sure you heard about it.

Here is a small part of what they said:

"What Happens When the Spots Come On: The Impact of Commercials on the Radio Audience is the first in a series of studies on the radio audience behavior during commercials using the power of passive electronic measurement, both for audiences and for commercial occurrences.

The study dispels the mistaken belief among advertisers, agencies and radio executives that radio loses a considerable portion of its audience during commercial breaks."

This is wrong in so many ways.

First, I'm not buying their assumption that radio executives ever believed that "radio loses a considerable portion of its audience during commercial breaks". I think everybody with half a brain is well aware that we lose audience when they leave radio because they have something else to do. Don't you? Yes, some people in cars will push a button. But most listeners have a life.

Second, the study conclusions strong imply that an 8% loss of audience during a commercial break is a good thing. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. We don't have a breakdown of whether the commercials caused the tune-out. We don't even know if was tune-out, or turn-off. There is a difference. But nothing in the data tells us anything about motivation.

Third, they simply measured the wrong thing. If commercials on a station make listeners unhappy, because of the way they are packaged, or what they sound like, or how long they interrupt the programming, and they find another station that does a better job while also playing music they like, the listeners will leave. Not for a song, an hour or a day. Permanently.

They won't tune out, because they won't tune in.

How are you going to measure that effect? By asking people. And when you ask people, they have a lot of very negative things to say about how we handle commercials. We have a huge body of research about listener attitudes on everything, including commercials.

If you want to ignore everything the listeners are trying to tell you about what makes it hard to keep listening, and base your commercial policy on the fact that they don't immediately turn radios off the instant you play commercials, okay. And if your kids don't literally leave home the first time you treat them unfairly, you're a good parent, right?

I believe in electronic measurement. It has many benefits. Proving that you can operate your station with high commercial loads and low quality production standards is not one of them.

Bad research. Very bad research.

Don't you agree?

Phantom Cume

Hey, Merry Christmas! Sorry for the long delay since the last blog entry. I just did an analysis - should have done this years ago - that shows the fall music testing season extends almost precisely from September 15 to December 15. At that time, some things definitely get put on the back burner. And, I regret, this blog has been one of them. But I'll try to be a lot more regular, at least until the spring music testing season explodes on March 15.

This week, Arbitron (the US ratings company) held its annual "Consultant Fly-In". And they released some "interesting" information.

First, some background. When PPM was introduced, the first and absolutely huge difference everybody noticed was the greatly elevated cume level for many stations. At the same time, TSL dropped like a submarine with screen doors.

Arbitron's John Snyder addressed this. Using the Houston PPM data, he showed that most of the extra cume now being seen actually comes from people who listen to a station less than one hour per week. In his words, "..they had exposure."

The radio trades are reporting this, but they aren't connecting the dots. Let me help.

1. The diary did a fine job of measuring a station's cume. As the Ball State University study showed, diaries lose about 5% of listening. Put another way, you lose mostly short listens, from people who aren't seeking you out, but just happen to wander into your audio field.

2. Maybe that lost listening is enough to mean something to the sales department. But it means very little to those of us in programming.

3. TSL is an average. Include more very short listens, and it drops. Nobody likes short TSL. The odds of missing a commercial go up, and advertisers go away. But this should be easy to explain, since we are, in truth, only adding an extra, formerly unmeasured, part of our audience. We are adding those who "had exposure."

4. But sadly, radio is probably in trouble with this one. We don't have many sophisticated tools for dealing with audience TSL distribution. The ratings book doesn't have a separate cume value for "greater than 1 hour per week" listeners. And all of our existing reach and frequency curves, originally developed by Westinghouse in the mid-1070's , are now useless.

5. In fact, the diary has been kind to radio. It loses a little listening, but it is from people who are engaging in behavior that is worthless to advertisers. Now those advertisers will beat us up over our new low TSL values. Radio? No loyalty!

6. Worse, we are going to get what we asked for, a better look at reality. A lot of people don't really use or care much for radio. Those people were, I think we will now confirm, the ones who failed to send back their diaries. But we'll get more of them with PPM. It involves a lot less work. And every person of that type, who doesn't really use radio much, but is now in the survey, with their behavior accurately recorded, will make radio look weaker.

Conclusion? Potential problems for the sales department aside, how can you not be in favor of a more accurate rating system? Personally, I'm hoping that the minute by minute data will help us do a much better job of managing how we put together our programming, schedule our commercial breaks and sequence our music. Those are new opportunities that we should all be excited about. Agree?