The Secrets Of Side Cume

Fixing Format Fluctuations

If you're an experienced programmer, you probably struggled to understand format fluctuations. You no doubt are always looking beyond the music for new ways to create great radio. You want to find ways to update and fine-tune your station's sound, work on your marketing skills and improve on your knowledge of constructive discontent and programming moxie. What you're also really looking for is something I like to call fringe cume or "side cume." You have to do this sifting for side cume within budget (sometimes with no budget) and along with everything else you've been assigned.

The secret to getting some side cume is to treat the format like a restaurant. Listeners are like customers who come for the food (music) but stay, return, tell friends of the ambience and fun and the waiter (air personality). As you know, today consumers have many more kinds of specialty restaurants to choose from; Urban and UrbanAC formats are very much like specialty restaurants. What's more, now consumers can create dishes at home they used to have to go out for. So, if we treat our stations like restaurants and work harder to get them to return to us and tell their friends about us (the friends are new cume), we can score.

Cume is especially important in the PPM world. If we use restaurant parlance, we better give them not only fine, well-prepared food and ambience, but also a consistently engaging wait staff and a free interactive dinner show.

Content-driven Urban and UrbanAC stations need to be providing listeners with occasions of listening, making appointments and then keeping those appointments. I hear stations constantly promise things they can't or don't deliver on time. If you offer something in the next 20 minutes and then forget to provide what you promised, you have not only lost an opportunity to build cume, you may have caused them to tune to your competition just because they are angry or disappointed.

Realistically, this process has to continue even though you may have a syndicated show in place. You have to know what's coming up on those shows -- and you should insist that the syndication company provide this information to you on a regular basis.

Here are a couple more things to look for. Does there appear to be a breakdown in the music rotation when the shifts change? This is a very common problem, one that with syndication you may have little or no control over, but one that can affect your ability to pull some side cume from your competition. When you are not syndicated, what happens on the weekends when the part-timers take over for the full-timer or the syndicated show? It's important to answer all these questions honestly and completely and then take the appropriate action.

Understanding The Numbers

It's important to understand the numbers that can make a difference in our careers and lives. The numbers we're referring to, obviously, are Arbitron numbers, and there is a story behind the numbers. It is also important to do a ratings analysis; you should examine your numbers. Believe it or not, the best time to do an analysis is after you've had a good book. Why? Well, because it's hard to find something that isn't there. You have to market to develop new listeners, and usually, unless your station does something to reverse it, cume is always going down.

If you had a good book, you could easily say that yours has become a favorite station for your core audience, but that's somewhat illusory. Favorite station is a value judgment, not any measure of listening. Those diary-keepers who listed your station may or may not be partisans. Another common usage term is "loyal audience." That doesn't mean anything, either. There's no definition for loyalty. It's whatever you want it to be.

When we analyze formats across the country my thought is that if all the markets are down more than 10%, that's significant. When we find a format off by only a few tenths, we don't call it a change. On an individual station level, if your ratings haven't changed much, it's likely they will change just because of how the process is set up, especially depending on your audience level.

One of the things that affects audience levels is the question of what really constitutes a so-called "heavy listener." Iit is probably best defined as anyone listening to a single station for more than 100 quarter-hours in a given week. Imagine someone who spends 25 hours a week with your station. Approximately 39% of your quarter-hours will come from heavy listeners. If they credit our station, we're glad, but it can't help but make us wonder what some of these people do with their busy lives in these fast times.

Regardless, these heavy listeners dramatically affect your station's ratings. When your station is up in the Winter and down in the Spring, you should immediately look for these heavy listeners. Sometimes, a really strong, well-executed contest or promotion can cause these ratings swings.

The average listener tunes in to a strong station three to four days a week. Now this is a station with consistently strong ratings -- and it could still mean you're not credited three to six days in a given week.

Not surprisingly and regardless of format, Arbitron survey's first day is either Thursday (if you're still living in the diary world) or Monday (if you're being measured by the PPM). They're potentially the most important days. They trigger survey enthusiasm; you very typically find people get more involved with the process. They'll listen to more radio stations on Monday or Thursdays. While it's interesting, it doesn't mean they'll listen to your station more.

PPM stations get nearly 60% of their total week's cume on Monday. Friday is about 55%. The quarter-hour is at about the same percentage level. In examining successful Urban stations across America, however, we've also seen Mondays, Tuesday and Fridays as the day in which the highest listening occurred.

Speaking of buying, some GMs overreact and buy into the misguided precept that it's time to fire their PD and/or change formats behind one book of dwindling digits. We personally knew of an owner/GM who was preparing for a major format change after his station's rank dropped from third to sixth in adults 25-54. What he hadn't noticed was that his average quarter-hour rating of 2.5 was the same in both books, while two other stations in non-competitive formats had enjoyed unusual upward spikes.

To help everyone avoid similar unnecessary pain owing to ratings misunderstanding, we thought we'd share a couple thoughts. Sample size and the size of the audience are key determinants of the theoretical error and range around an estimate in which weighting and sampling vagaries must be considered.

In the meantime, here is something to think about: If you have a great Spring book, make certain it really is great (ie: statistically significant upward movement unrelated to seasonal patterns). Remember, too, that some people aren't receptive to a litany of their limitations.

Word.