What Moves The Meter?

Re-Writing The Rules For Electronic Measurement

In response to the many who have e-mailed me, Twittered me and inquired about it, here is the first in a series of editorials totally dedicated to Arbitron's PPM and how the meter has already changed Urban radio forever.

Arbitron's PPM has already revolutionized how we program as well as how advertising is bought and sold. Every month you're getting unbelievable amounts of data. From an organizational perspective there is a lot of learning that has to go on and go on quickly.

From a programmer's perspective, even if you fill your listeners' speakers and bones with creative marrow, if there are no meter adjustments made in your presentation, you could still lose and quickly under electronic measurement.

Programmers literally have to retrain their brain. PPM will punish those who are not prepared. It's been said that most everything we have learned in a diary world means little or nothing in a PPM world. That's not entirely true. What is true is that with electronic measurement, being funny or clever or playing the right-researched songs at the right time is still important. It's just not enough -- especially in an over-signaled market full of format-similar stations. The tried-and-true fundamentals need to be better and faster than ever with PPM. With the meter, inadvertent listening might help a station's cume, but it doesn't contribute many quarter-hours. The quarter-hours that a station needs to perform well in share come from listeners who intentionally tune in and do it day-after-day.

Because PPM is passive it picks up lots of accidental tuning. That's why cume is larger in PPM than it was with the diary. However, even if the listener likes what they hear, there's no guarantee they'll return. The challenge is getting this accidental listener to come back later. To return they have to figure out what they're listening to and how to get back there.

Audience Churn

Unfortunately, every station has audience churn. Listeners might grow tired of their favorite station or they might outgrow it. A listener could change jobs and stop commuting or have a shorter commute. They could even lose their job and watch television more. For any of these reasons, unrelated to the quality of the product, once-loyal listeners might stop listening. For Urban stations just to hold their own, they need to replace each listener who leaves. And to grow you need to add more listeners than you lose. It's the "growing-shedding" theory once more.

Churn is not unique to radio. The difference is that radio is free and readily available. Radios, particularly those in cars, have scan buttons. People accidentally find new stations all the time. Just like they don't stumble onto new restaurants or clubs, people don't stumble onto

search engines.

The most important marketing tool your station can have is still word-of-mouth. A recommendation from a friend is more powerful than any other form of advertising. The Internet hasn't changed that. In a sense, it has only expanded it. Today word-of-mouth extends to social networking, websites, blogs, discussion boards and texting.

Revised Format Fundamentals

In order to score in Arbitron's PPM world of electronic measurement, you have to do something to make listeners stay and/or come back again tomorrow. Winning personalities have to effectively forward or recycle the audience to the next quarter-hour or hour. In PPM it's all about what's coming up next. It doesn't matter what has already happened or what some listeners may have missed.

In the diary world it was all about pounding the call letters and positioning statements so that at "voting times" the recall was high. With PPM it's more important than ever to be extremely protective of Time Spent Listening (TSL).

Even on music stations you still need a great morning show because the only way to make average quarter-hours (AQH) increase is to build up your TSL by at least 15 minutes. In the PPM world, personalities have to engage the audience quickly. Urban AC stations have another problem: How do they maintain an overall template of familiarity while convincing listeners that you're as young and hip as they believe they are?

The short answer is to keep the music broad, fresh and mass appeal. Have a topical, female-friendly morning show, play all the researched hits and realize that you get one or two songs a year you can own ... so make sure they're the right ones. Understand that you have to stop thinking of your station as an Urban AC station or a pure Urban station and stop playing only the songs targeted for our format by the labels. And know which label representatives have taken the time to really understand your station and its goals. Start looking for jams that our audience loves outside of a limited, artificially defined sound. Your playlist should be familiar, but still include the occasional surprise that pops up, whether it's an exciting new song, an "oh wow" jam from the past, or a new hit song that breaks format boundaries. Regardless of the station's strategy, some element of acceptable unpredictability has to be built in.

Don't clutter the station with junk. With PPM, clutter is absolutely fatal. Choose contests that appeal to women in the demo and make sure they're done in such a way that the remainder of the audience that never play contests can get off vicariously by hearing the contest played. There is a science to contests. I've mastered it and I will share some of those secrets with you in another editorial.

Another example of clutter, believe it or not, is live on-air interviews. Be extremely careful with them. We have seen dramatic losses in listening levels resulting from on-air interviews ... even with big stars. Even when they're promoted as a feature and listening appointments set, listening dips substantially with artists visiting on-air talent in the studio -- because it is nearly impossible to control them. My advice is to take these artists into the production studio, have them record some custom drops, do the interview and then edit it. Cut and paste the strongest portions of the interview and then use a series of short interview segments. Just don't put them on the air live. Traditionally, Urban radio has served as an important conduit between artists and their fans and on-air visits have been a mainstay for Urban radio for years. All that has changed with PPM.

Listening Events

Listening events work wonders with PPM. For example, if there is a big guest or topic coming up on tomorrow's morning show, whether it's local or syndicated, it has to be promoted with enormous frequency to turn it into a listening event and make it really effective.

We can produce promos that give new listeners a sample of what they're going to find on our stations. This type of promo is just as important today as it was in the diary world - perhaps even more important. The key is to constantly refresh those promos. Use different voices and approaches.

Another listening event that works well in PPM is a contest that rewards repeated listening. We want listeners to come back over and over ... and a contest that rewards repeated listening is a great way to generate additional quarter-hours. The goal is to bond with the audience. Listeners who feel a special connection with your station will spend more time with it and tune in more regularly.

Finally, the format remains to be challenged in the same way it was challenged under the diary. With PPM it's absolutely vital to take care of your core listeners and core demos, but also rise to the challenge of bringing a younger audience into the mix. From another perspective, the biggest challenge is how we wrap ourselves around the multi-platform experience that we know all of our listeners and potential listeners are dealing with. We only have so much time and so many resources. We can't afford to burn brain cells looking for short cuts that don't exist. With Arbitron's PPM, more than ever it's important to remember you can't sacrifice your needs without compromising your integrity.

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