Research Roll-Out

Can It Make A Difference?

In a changing media climate where, in order to survive, companies and stations have been forced to reduce costs, we can look for further reduced staffs, budgets and autonomy. Our business is separated right now into groups of people who are broadcasters and those who are broadcast property consolidators.

We worry about the trepidation of facing unemployment in the current economy, the current broadcast landscape, and keeping a station relevant in a world of ever-expanding entertainment choices. Unfortunately, in the midst of all these cutbacks, one of the things that suffers is any form of research. And this is why those of us who purport to understand the new Urban radio model say that many of our wounds are really self-inflicted.

Added to the problem is that even if we come close to getting the music right, what does it mean if we have turned our air talent into imported trained dogs? I mean, if you want to hear that it's 90 degrees and sweaty outside, voicedtracked air talent, no matter how talented, can't give that to you. Couple that with the fact that many local personalities are no longer given the latitude to talk about the fact that it's raining, that school is out, or the concert coming up on the weekend. This means everything else, especially the music, has to be right on. Companies that have cut back on their callout have also practically eliminated their AMTs (auditorium music tests) and perceptuals.

Let's take an optimistic view. Despite challenging times, let's say that you are among the fortunate whose station has found some money for a music test. Now, the problem is you could spend money on a music test and not truly benefit from it. What's worse, a poorly executed music test virtually guarantees your budget will get slashed or eliminated next time around.

How do you avoid that problem? First, there has to be a strategy. You have to have the market data before you schedule the test. And in some cases, research funds would be better spent on a market-wide perceptual study so you can better understand the opportunities and threats facing your station.

Second, if you know who you should be researching and the types of songs you should be testing, the challenge now is screening the auditorium music test (AMT) strategically. You have to be able to identity your music strategy by confidently knowing who your primary and secondary gender target and cume-sharing competitors are.

Internet-Based Music Testing

With the advent and explosion of the Internet, one of the natural evolutions was online music testing. I don't care how skilled or experienced you are, there's a limit to what you can do with online research. Is it better than not doing any research at all? Maybe. The whole idea was to reduce research costs by providing Internet-based music testing and perceptual feedback so that programmers would have street-level contacts with the audience. Stations can post notices on their website and create their own sample size -- even custom demos that it likes.

There are, however, several concerns with this research methodology. First is the concern about skewed results from non-random sample recruiting. If the samples are self-selected, hopefully they will wind up being folks who become involved and are often P1s or active listeners. But that is often not the case. The other concern is that a station competitor could corrupt your database. Yes, they'd have to do a ton of infiltrations, but it has been done.

Attracting Loyal Females

If your Urban station targets young females, you should use females in your promos, liners and sweepers. They have to capture passion and excitement in the way they express it. How many stations have you heard lately that are still using what I call "growlers." Growlers are those deep male voices that are supposed to remind the listeners about some event, upcoming music sweeper or station image.

The thought there is that Urban stations must have passion and energy. But that doesn't mean you growl or scream at the listeners. That type of approach maybe has meaning for a 17-year-old male, but it could have just the opposite effect for females. Many of those ladies could be heavy users or P1s.

What's up with the heavy listeners? Has there been a shift with PPM? First of all, heavy listeners are usually described as those listening for over 400 hours a week. Their characteristics tend to match the market for the most part, but do skew older. Under PPM, most stations benefit from those heavy listeners who tend to show fewer turnovers than the full panel. Roughly 70% of a panel's heavy listeners remain each month.

Science Of The Unfamiliar Position

This is a condition in which a station plays a song the audience might not know or even might not like, but if they've done a good enough job through the years of really bonding with their listeners and pre-selling it, the audience still stay with them. In an era when everybody's walking around with a cell phone and/or an e-mail apparatus in their hand, you could instantly go from a P-1 to a P-2 when you introduce new music. You have to keep your station fresh, but you can't take a chance on alienating the audience. You also can't make change without changing something and changes are called for.

Fully understanding the science of the unfamiliar position means you have to overcome inertia. Overcoming inertia is a struggle on all levels, whether it's personal or adapting a format for its own survival. Everything you say and play is going to piss somebody off. That's a natural dynamic that occurs with any station with a large diverse cume. Urban formats in particular are designed to occasionally head off in a different musical direction any time they introduce a new artist or song. You spend your whole life as a programmer trying to reduce all negatives, but then when you make a change you believe in you know that will disappoint some listeners. You are forced to take a step back and say, "Look how connected the other listeners are to what we're doing." You have to make sure the disappointed listeners are in the minority.

Today's listeners are impatient. They want a station to completely entertain them. They want to hear their favorite songs every time they tune it. They love new music, but they want a station that front-announces or back-announces new music.

Rotations have become extremely important. You want rotations that don't divide into 24 evenly and thus create a playlist that is too time repetitive. What this means is that no matter how busy you are, no matter how many stations you're responsible for, you can't pass the scheduling challenge on to Selector. You can't tell the scheduling system to keep the tempo of the music at a certain level and force the jams played out of stopsets and the top-of-the-hour to have more tempo and energy. The result will be that your rotations will be unbalanced. Daypart control will be damaged, or even if it is somehow maintained, the rotations will be thrown even further out of balance.

There are stations that are jukeboxes. They're going to be part of the picture ... and Arbitron's PPM seems to work for some of them. My theory is that the best thing Urban stations can do to survive in the PPM world is to create the best station they can by playing the game as well as they can, including using "local" to your advantage and trust that in the long run, the meters will reflect that.

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