Doing Diary Duty, Part III

This week's article on Arbitron concludes our three-week look at how understanding the company and its methodologies can improve your station's performance. The previous articles are now available in the Urbanizing archives, which can be accessed through a link at the bottom of this page.

Internet Streaming

It is used by 13% of U.S. on a weekly basis (and growing). The online audience is growing along with the increasing use of broadband. It matches the lifestyle of younger consumers. You can use it to serve your P1s and make money.

New media enters the mainstream. Eight in ten Americans now have access to the Internet from any location and continues to rise.

Residential broadband has tripled since January 2001. Fifty million Americans used online audio or video in the past month. The weekly Internet broadcast audience has grown to 30 million. Monthly "streamies" are spread across a wide demographic spectrum. "Streamies" say they prefer advertising to subscription models.

Paying no monthly fee for programming with several commercials per hour was the preferred method.

Four in ten Americans (40%) have listened to Internet audio. Listening to radio stations online has increased five-fold in the past years (33%). "Variety" and "music stations close to your taste" are leading images of Internet radio. (Things that they can't find elsewhere on local radio.) Internet broadcast consumers have considerable buying power.

Arbitron Internet broadcast rating use metrics in the language of media planners, buyers and sellers including AQH, Cume, and TSL. Only subscribers are measured. Then there are server-based measurements for all tuning events; not a sample. The result is maximum reliability

Revenue is driven by ratings. Is revenue directly tied to ratings? The more ears we have to rent, the more revenue we will make. With Arbitron Roll-Up you can quickly assess the status of your station. A PDF pops out of the machine. There are five different sections. A major group or company can see at a glance how well they are doing.

5.) Format Trending: Trending the format inside the company.

Here's a quick language-weighting refresher. What's happening with population estimates? Arbitron remains fully committed to language weighting. Language weighting requires extensive software and compatible population estimates. Significant progress is being made on both.

Currently, Arbitron estimates are weighed on up to three dimensions including age, sex, geography and race/ethnic. Arbitron has asked about language usage among Hispanics since 1997.

For some, the question was why bother? The answer: language usage has a direct connection with radio listening. Language-weighting systems cannot handle the information. We have to look at highs and lows for Spanish language dominant universe estimates.

The PPM Evolution

Why do customers believe PPM is good for radio? There are new PPM enhancements. The next steps and timing will include commercial rollout. PPM will help radio become more accountable. It will help radio to program more effectively and allow radio to understand more about audience than ever before. It will also enable stations to retain and grow audience while providing advertisers with more in-depth knowledge about radio, thus increasing the value of the medium.

PPM will better connect retail/advertising activity to retail sales, proving its effectiveness. It will put radio on the same platform as television, improving its chance of garnering a greater share of broadcast advertising budgets. It will allow radio to compete with TV and cable for children's advertising and to program to this audience. And it will increase radio advertising revenue overall.

Being able to look at all media using the same measurement system will allow for improved media planning and buying decisions which will increase the credibility of ratings overall. And the value of radio as an advertising medium will increase by offering expanded features such as passive measurement of other media. Along with database integration, minute-by-minute audience flow reports may become available as soon as next year.

The PPM is going to become a reality -- the question is when. And the answer is as soon as Arbitron feels it is ready. My instincts tell me that it could happen in several major markets as soon as 2007, depending on the results of the recent test markets and the proposed merger with Nielsen.

The PPM has a decidedly better lens for measuring today's diverse audience and observing media advertising. It is designed to focus on radio audience data, cable and television audience data, and even Internet stream audience data. This is all captured from the same respondent and integrated into a single database. Arbitron is currently researching how to best include satellite providers XM and Sirius.

The PPM provides near passive capture of minute-by-minute multimedia audience exposure in real time. Respondents do not need to recall what television show they may have been watching or what radio station they may have been listening to. They do not need to know the source of that audio stream they listened to on the office computer because the PPM does all the work.

For the first time, advertisers will be able to understand how campaign reach and frequency build -- across media and over time -- in the local market at the person's level. All television and radio -- all in one place.

Of special interest to those serving the broadcasting community are the following questions:

2.) How will PPM affect individual urban format performances?

Following the Philadelphia-Delaware-Houston test, we'll be getting ever closer to the day when the "ratings recall game," as we know it will be history!

One thing all of us are hoping is the PPM will deliver is more accuracy and fewer wobbles. Diary methodology has always seemed to favor AC stations and penalize urban stations. One reason for this is that the female in most households typically opens the mail, fills out and returns the diary(s).

What you have are other people filling out your diary. Typically, what we've seen in dozens of recent Arbitron diary reviews are P1 listeners writing down one day that they listened all day long and on the other six that they didn't listen at all. (We know from our review that they did listen on those other days.)

We're all curious to see what type of impact the PPM has on listeners of our genre, who are very on-the-go, active people.

On the plus side, the PPM promises to provide quicker answers to questions on whether or not a contest, promotion or new marketing ploy worked. If we have an idea to take a promotion and roll with it for a couple of months, you'll be able to check results within a few days or weeks.

We all know our own habits in an automobile where we're punching around. Now, for the first time, we'll have a device that actually measures that jumping around.

Then, if we can match that back to the programming that took place at a particular moment, we'll be able to learn a lot about the appeal of different elements, or programs on our affiliate stations.

Aside from the PPM updates, we were glad to see time devoted to discussing the peculiarities of Arbitron diary placement and methodology during this year's "Arbitron Consultant's Fly-In."

In Conclusion

We need to know the enemy to conquer it. We're not saying that Arbitron is the enemy, but they are a force and they need to be better understood. Ratings suppliers such as Arbitron don't intentionally make a lot of mistakes, but you constantly have to watch out and be aware of the many call-letter, slogan, station name and frequency changes. Things can get confused and occasionally go wrong.

Even though Arbitron has been audited and put more systems in place to prevent errors, they're people and people make mistakes. We need to make sure that we're getting all the credit that we deserve by understanding how to play the Arbitron game, and by forcing them to give us the benefit of the doubt.

For instance, by fully understanding the ascription process, you can get partial credit, simply by registering (or changing) a slogan with Arbitron that will give your station a competitive edge.

It would be good to establish a baseline with Arbitron. Very few stations can do this without the direction of a consultant experienced in Arbitron analyses. Having a consistent diary-review schedule is important. Any time is a good time to begin the Arbitron diary review process, but the best time for a review is when you have the most diaries. It's important to know how the station is performing when it's normal. When the ratings go down (and they will) we can find out exactly what happened. It's very hard to find out what happened when you don't know what the base is. The key is to make certain there's no confusion with your identifiers. Arbitron is required to edit in cases where something is listed other than call letters or exact frequencies. It also means others can claim credit.

What we don't want to do is accept the fallacy that our audience is elusive and somehow special group of listeners that Arbitron is going out of its way to avoid. Nor should we accept the mindset that says, "Poor us, our ratings are lower because our audience is not as smart or articulate."

They may or not be, but they are listeners who count and who have needs. What we have to do is determine their needs and serve them. Then we have to get full credit for them when Arbitron tallies up the score.

As a side bar issue, urban stations should absolutely understand and sell the qualitative value of our audience. The danger comes when be begin to believe that our numbers and our audience have less value.

Despite its shortcomings and frustrations, for those of us who are willing to try to understand Arbitron better and persevere, this is still an exciting, challenging and rewarding time be part of an industry where the interests of listeners, agencies, labels, sales, radio, print and music collide.

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