PPM Gives Us Yet Another Reason to Focus on Quintiles, not P1, P2, etc.

A study of PPM results by DMR and the University of Wisconsin shows a lot of instability in which station is P1 (first preference) for a given panelist, from one week to the next. It is yet another weakness in the very term "P1".

In the thousands of books I analyzed with InstantREPLAY diary analysis, I ignored P1, P2, etc. For me, the key has always been listening quintiles. Jim Yergin with Westinghouse, when he developed reach and frequency tables in the mid 1970s, showed that there is a great consistency in quintile distribution of listening. From memory, about 66% of all listening tends to come from Q5 (if you consider 1 as light, 5 as heavy) listeners. You could have a single P2 listener who contributes more listening than another listener who is P1 to your station.

Even before the multi-week survey that is part of the PPM methodology, we knew from our experience with call-out music research and from comparing screen-in interviews for AMTs with what people put on their answer sheets that some people change their P1 station from week to week. It will be interesting to learn how much the amount of listening, as well as P1, P2, etc. choices, vary from week to week. And this will be interesting both on the individual station level and for radio overall.

Appealing to heavy radio listeners has, of course, always been important, since they are the key to building decent TSL, versus only cume. And the work done by myself and Michael Albl, (then head of CMM’s Nest Marketing division) in the mid 1990s, showed that it is very difficult for a diary keeper to become a Q5 listener unless they pick your station for their at-work listening. This is something else that will be interesting to explore in the new world of PPM.

Unfortunately, for research studies other than ratings, we can’t afford to pre-test people and get a detailed picture of their listening behavior. We have to go with stated station preference, which is a much more legitimate use of the term “Preference One”, to find those who are buying into what we are selling. But as the ratings show, we don’t learn nearly as much about behavior as we wish we did when somebody says we are their favorite station.