The good news is that radio still is the number one audio reach medium. Without question. The challenges right now and people using radio is down, I mean up to 20% across the board. Fewer people listening to radio and we don't know if we're coming back. Welcome to BRANDwidth On Demand, your Guide to Rebooting Radio. I kinda looked for two things. How is Nielsen performing? How's the sample doing? 'cause we always tell our clients, you don't pay Nielsen for ratings. You pay them for sample
BRANDwidth on Demand. Rebooting radio with a different take on all radio can be. Now your guides through the metamorphosis. David Martin and author of the book BRANDwidth, media branding Coach Kipper McGee.
This time around, our guest brings a wealth of programming experience to us. He's programmed in Washington d C Boston, Detroit, Cincinnati, and he's held corporate programming positions for A M F M and Clear Channel. He's a self-described data geek and understands the needs and challenges of programmers In today's radio environment, he serves as programming research consultant for the research director Inc. BRANDwidth On Demand is proud to welcome Steve Allen. Hey Steve.
Hey, welcome.
Thanks for having me. It's really nice. I appreciate it.
So today we're talking ratings and to really take things to their core. What do you see as the key performance indicators, the KPIs that rating services like Nielsen or Eastland provide? And more importantly, what are the very first things you look for when you're checking out the performance of a client station or even their competition?
Obviously ratings and ranking and share and all that stuff is what everybody looks at, but we peek under the hood and I kinda look for two things. How is Nielsen performing? How's the sample doing? 'cause we always tell our clients, you don't pay Nielsen for ratings. You pay them for sample. And if they are, supposed to give you X number of meters or diaries, you wanna make sure you hit that mark. But even deeper than that, Nielsen does a pretty good job on a six plus basis.
But you really wanna look at your target demos. So let's say you're targeting women 35, 44, and the index is, When waiting kicks in, that can really have an effect on your numbers. And we see that happen all the time. Beyond that, and that's one of the services we provide is the kind of like the ratings whisper. But then beyond that there's, there are certain things we like to look at. How's your t s L compared to the market, right?
If you have a good healthy market, P S L, are you getting your fair share? How are you doing on rotating people through day parts and vertically and horizontally recycling them, getting those occasions and how obviously the, obviously is how you're performing in your key demographics and versus your competition. But yeah some things beyond just, AQH, TSL and Cume, can tell you whether your station's doing well. And on top of that I like to take a longer view.
If you just look at one book, so many things can happen in one book that you really can't base it on, on, on one book. You have to look at the longer trend. And keep in mind that our, our mantra is there are four things that will affect your ratings, right? Something you've done. You change your music, change your morning show whatever format, something your competitor has done. Same thing. Something big has happened in the marketplace. Christmas music, the best example of that.
Orel, we so all those factors play in to see how well you are doing. And what do you look for
overall, Steve, when you're sitting down with a client station and taking a look at the the most recent full quarter numbers what are you looking for when you're looking at those numbers?
If we've been with them for a while, we wanna see how the station's trending and what their goals are. What do they expect? Is this a station that it's expected to, be a top five performer or is this a flaker? They're just trying to hurt somebody else. So it really depends on what the needs are, and then we want to give them a reality check on what's really happening over time with their numbers in Nielsen.
Steve, we're hearing lots about the decrease in even demise of radio as a distribution platform or device. Which leads us to the question, what trends are you seeing ratings wise in the consumption of audio and especially
radio? There's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that radio still is the number one audio reach medium without question. It gets everywhere. And while we are not at the levels we were, let's say 20 years ago, it's still pretty robust. The challenges right now and the pandemic certainly accelerated. This is home is down. People using radio is down, up to 20% across the board. Fewer people listening to radio and we don't know why, and we don't know if they're coming back now.
Hybrid, right? People are not in their car as much as they used to be. So if they're only working three days a week versus five, that's potentially 40% of their weekday listening has gone away. There's certainly a demo problem. Radio is increasingly an older medium. Not unusual for markets to have their median listening age, right around 50 people under the age of 35. Especially under the age of 24, oftentimes don't even listen to all radio for an hour a day.
So that radio does have a youth problem. And the third thing, and I think, we're gonna talk about digital and stuff there's, there's a hefty number, a percentage of the population depending on the market that does not even have a radio in their house. And that sometimes could be as high as 30, 35%. At the same time, smart speaker penetration, as we know, has leveled off. Everybody bought one with the pandemic and now they're like, eh, do I really need Alexa? But that's not even at 50%.
So the thought that Alexa would replace your in-home radio, it, there's some of that there. Maybe the real opportunity for radio is the mobile apps, right? Because we know that basically 97% of people have a smartphone. So if you're trying to reach people beyond your stick, that's a good way to do it.
One question that some of my clients have been struggling with is the idea of total line reporting, especially versus splitting off their streams for different commercials and whatnot. So first, tell us about total line reporting and for stations that don't practice it. Might that be impacting
their ratings? No, not yet. Nielsen the whole odd I, the idea behind Nielsen one is to someday be the, the one ring to rule 'em all right? Where they, it's television, it's digital, it's radio, it's everything. And they could just sit there and go, boom, here's your number. They're not there yet. They were close with a system called s, I think SDK years ago, where they were gonna encode every single. Audio player on the internet. But that fell through. We're not sure why.
It's still the same thing we dealt with for 20, 30, 40 years. It's recall, it's, I listen from nine to five. No one listens from nine to five. People have to go to the bathroom. Know. So it's you didn't see the decline in listening and time spent listening as much in diary markets as you have in P M. And PPM is reality. I'll say this, give Nielsen it to do, man. The meter works.
It does a very accurate job, not only of measuring what it hears, but if you extrapolate from that, it shows your listener behavior. If you really dig into the numbers, you can see, you get a better picture of how people actually use the service. And
Steve, what's your counsel to stations on streaming and podcasting?
I, podcasting, eh, I think the value for podcasting right now for radio from a ratings perspective is if you've got a, a big personality and you can get somebody to listen to their bits within, I think it's 24 hours, you'll get credit for it. Otherwise it's a money play if you can make money off of it. Streaming, I will be upfront saying that as a company, and we are big believers in total line reporting. That said, it's a business decision, right?
'cause first off, if you're gonna encode your stream, you gotta pay an extra fee of Neil. So there's a cost involved. Secondly, if you can monetize your stream at a higher rate than what the stream numbers will help you. Then by all means, do that. And third, Nielsen does a awful job and they've admitted it, of recording, streaming on earbuds, right? They have a headphone adjustment, but there's no way they can accurately reflect that.
We've looked at backend, server side numbers from clients and the actual number of listeners compared to what Nielsen registers, it's, the gap is humongous. That all said. That if you are total line reporting and let's say you are, your station's getting a point, you're one of, eight stations in the market with a 0.3 rating, right? And we all know that's rounding, right? That 0.3, somewhere between 0.250 and 0.349 that 0.3 may be a 0.340. And you get an extra 200 aqh from your stream.
All of a sudden that 0.3 came becomes a 0.4 and your sales manager realizes that their rating has gone up 33%. And in big markets, how much is a point worth? It's millions of dollars. Okay,
so one question that some of my stations have had trouble wrapping their head around at first is the idea of total line reporting. So first of all, can you tell us what is total line reporting? And then for stations that don't practice it, what could be the impact? Their ratings?
The start with p M is extremely accurate in recording listening. They, and I shouldn't say listening what it hears technically, it's what it hears. Very accurate of it. Very precise in exactly how long someone is tuned into a particular product. Whereas diary is 100% recall and we know from years of experience that, some people fill it out at the end of the day, but probably more people out at the end of the week. It's Thursday through Wednesday. And so there.
I just ask anybody listening, sit down tonight and reconstruct your lunch menu for the last week. And see if you could actually remember exactly what you ate every day. You probably can't. But you wrote, you would remember what you like to eat. And I probably had a ham sandwich on Tuesday. It's the same way with diary, right? It's like my favorite radio station is x. So I know I listen to them and I get to the office at nine and I have them on at my desk until five.
And I don't take into account the fact that I had a bathroom break, three meetings and a phone call. So you know, it over inflates the listening and also the difference between the two is that you underestimate the number of stations you listen to. Because all the meter has to do is pick up five minutes of non-continuous listening in a quarter hour to give you credit for a station.
So if you know you go into the deli for lunch and they're playing another station that you never listened to, but you're standing in line for 10 minutes, guess what? You're now in their queue. Oh yeah. The other thing is sample, right? P M is panel based, so it's theoretically the same, 12 to 1500 or whatever your market size is. People every single day. Every week of the pa every day of the 28 day survey for diary. It's an entirely new sample every week.
And especially if you're in a continuous diary measurement market and you're looking at three book average at 36 weeks, that's 36 different samples where, now there's a yin and the yang to that. The good news for the diary people is that if they didn't find your people in week one, they might find them in. The problem with the P M sample is households can be locked in for up to two years.
And if all of a sudden and you see this a lot like the Christian contemporary stations where they'll get a couple of heavy households and all of a sudden they're a top five station for a year, and then those two households leave and they drop to eight. And we see that with formats. Formats go hot and cold based on a lot of times on panel because there's not enough of that particular format's fan base in the sample. Yeah.
Our guest is Steve Allen, the Nielsen Audio Whisperer and Programming research consultant for the Research Director, Inc. We've got links to the research director and some info you may not have seen plus Steve's blog and more just scroll down
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Yeah, think of BRANDwidth On Demand as your unconventional convention. Episodes of about 15 minutes at a time, on demand. Coming up. Steve shares some of the best advice he's ever gotten.
Hi, this is Dave Tyler from Musicmaster Scheduling, here with another Musicmaster Raving fan. Hi, I'm jeff McCarthy, Vice President of Programming for Duke Wright's Midwest Communications. Why do we succeed? Using Musicmaster for over 30 years! There now you know our secret. Ready to become a Musicmaster raving fan? Get in touch@musicmaster.com slash sales.
Hey, there. Kipper here. If your station is so many others, begging out for some sort of station merchandise for sale or even to give away, but the budget says Uhuh, your solution could be just a click away. Check out radio swag shop. It's in the show notes or simply go to radio swag shop.com/kipper, your audience and your budget will thank you.
Listen today, lead tomorrow BRANDwidth on Demand.
We're with Steve Allen, the go-to data guy for us. He's the programming research consultant for the Research Director Inc. Hey, Steve, what's the best piece of advice that you were given in your career so far, either in your PD days or now, and then what one piece of advice would you give to someone in charge of brand management or programming today?
I can't think of a specific moment where someone said, do this right. I can recall early in my career when I got my first big break on the air, it was a W Light in Washington dc. I was a night guy and Bob Hughes was the program director Bob Hughes. Just a brilliant programming mind. And Bob, I would come in early often and Bob would stay late often, and we would just sit in his office. I'm just some schmuck kid, that's just started, doing full-time there. And we would play the what if game.
What if, whether it was music scheduling or promotions or songs or whatever, most of it didn't get done but his willingness to sit there and banter back and forth with me and just, actually care what I thought and entertain the ideas really opened up a lot of doors for me mentally. And I think I tried to carry that through. My programming career, and even now it's let's talk about what we could do.
And so that was the most valuable thing that I can remember early on that really influenced what I did as far as the advice I would give. Now, if you're managing talent, which brand managers are, and operations director, you're managing talent, you really have to manage to those people. They're a different breed. And they, they you could joke that it's like herding cats, but they're all individuals and you want that.
You wanna enhance that individuality and you want to, you wanna really manage to your people. There is no such thing as one size fits all in creative management. Some of your people need to be coddled, some need to be cajoled, some to be challenged, some need to be the left alone, right? I think as a manager, it's your job to figure out what. Buttons to push or not to push on your people, put them in the best position to succeed.
Great advice. Our thanks to Steve Allen, links to his website, some great articles and more all in our regular show notes email. We send it out before every episode and you can easily get it. Just scroll down on your phone for a free subscription.
We'd like to thank our exec producer Cindy Huber for putting this together. Also, associate producer Hannah B for booking. And coming up next...
News will be the Savior of News Talk. I'm Holland Cooke and in the next BRANDwidth On Demand, we all know it. Political talk changes. No mind. You already know today what they're gonna say 'cause they said it yesterday. But the news is changing from moment to moment and I will tell you three ways to make your newscast instantly better.
That's a wrap Kipper. One of the secrets of success is endurance. We'll talk about it in one minute. Martinizing. Find it in show notes at BRANDwidth On Demand.com. I'm Dave Martin.
And I'm Kipper McGee. May all your BRANDwidth be WIDE!.