Steve

New to this year’s competition, all categories will now be accepting spots that were delivered via IP stream to computers, mobile applications or any other Internet device. “As our industry and business moves forward with new digital platforms, it is not only appropriate but necessary for our industry awards competition to reflect the complete sponsored audio content space,” stated Jeff Haley, President & CEO of the Radio Advertising Bureau, and Co-chair of the Radio Creative Fund.

This is a watershed moment. Here’s a link to the announcement:
2010 Radio Mercury Awards Call for Entry is Officially Open Streaming Commercials Now Eligible for Entry

1. The “Tipping Point” for terracasters is rapidly approaching
2. Use Arbitron PPM data to test commercial load on your station
3. Superserve your P1 audience now, before it’s too late

Background

A lot of digital ink has been spilt on the subject of how many units of advertising a radio station can support without losing listeners. Sean Ross of Edison Research started the ball rolling last week with his article in Ross on Radio, “It’s Time to Rethink your Spotload, Now.” A follow-up was written by Jim Kerr, of Triton Digital Media, entitled “Spotloads, Perception, and Listener Tolerance.”

Great points are made by both Tom and Jim. All radio people, whether “traditional” or “new” media types – need to pay close attention to how their spot loads effect listener behavior. For terracasters (I am floating this as a much easier term to use than “terrestrial broadcasters,” or “traditional radio”), the problem is like a cancer. It’s a small thing, poised to grow exponentially when the right set of circumstances align themselves.

The Issue

Right now, there are few realistic alternatives for most people who are in-car and listening to the radio. Sure, there’s iPods, streaming Pandora through iPhones and Androids, Sirius/XM and good old fashioned cassette decks. But most people don’t want to mess with this stuff. It’s the blinking clock syndrome. It’s hard enough to manage sending a text while you’re driving, let alone mess with the rest of this stuff.

The tipping point comes when easy, straightforward access to alternative channels comes to the major environments where people listen to terracasters today. We are still early in the adoption curve. It will take about 4 years for this tipping point to occur. Why? Because mass-market automobiles are just now being introduced with these kinds of features in them. As they filter out into the market, more people will become aware of them and begin to use the technologies. By 2014, these cars will begin to enter the resale market en masse and THAT’s when the tipping point occurs. When ordinary, average Americans can pick up a car with these technologies in the dashboard at their local “Ernie’s Auto” corner car lot, the tide will begin to turn dramatically.

This doesn’t mean that terracasters have 4 or five years to figure out the commercial spot load thing. Today’s behavior is a result of repetition of behavior from yesterday and the day before. Begin today to calculate the optimal spot load for your P1 listener group. How?

The Solution

Arbitron’s PPM data provides the best solution for determining listener behavior on a granular level. Without spending tons of money on third-party software (you could, but you don’t have to), you can use Arbitron’s PPM Analysis Tool to dig deep into the behavior of your listener.

Running this test will take some guts. You’ll have to very methodically tinker with your station’s spot count, positioning, and other variables you think could effect a P1′s behavior. You’ll have to wait for the relevant PPM data to be released. You’ll have to analyze it, then rinse and repeat. Run this kind of testing for 6 months or so. In the end, you’ll know what the magic number is for your listener. The problem is, of course, that that number is only good for today. It will change over time, so you must repeat this test frequently.

If you start this process today, determine what your magic number is, and implement whatever business process is necessary to make sure that you implement the spot count limit by 2012, you should be well-prepared for the tipping point.

Or, you could just run a maximum of 8 minutes, spread 2-3-3 and be done with it.

The NAB has had its ups and downs. I have been to about 8 of them since 2000. The first was a mind-blowing event; the scale of the show was almost to much to grasp. This continued for several years, until the 2007 show. That’s when the declining economy and other factors began to catch up and the NAB show began to contract. One signal was the departure of Apple as an exhibitor. Then came the 2008 show. It was nice because the halls were almost empty of people. But for exhibitors, it was a real disappointment. 2009 brought more of the same, but people expected it so they were prepared with low expectations.

So, I thought about 2010 NAB and wondered if this might just be an event in decline.

There’s no way to predict what the attendance will be, but after reviewing the NAB’s plans for the show on their website, http://nabshow.com/2010 , I have to say that this could be a very interesting event for anyone interested in the future of broadcast media.

What really prompted me to write this is the news that Shelley Palmer, media pundit and blogger, is going to keynote the technology luncheon. This choice of speaker puts a totally new focus on what the NAB is all about and makes me feel that they are beginning to “get it.” Shelley Palmer writes over at Jack Myers’ mediabizbloggers and at his own site, MediaBytes.

Oh – and they offered the same deal to readers of RadioEvangelist. So, if you’re thinking of going to NAB 2010 and want a free pass that includes (according to the PR agency), “the exhibit floor, Opening Keynote and State of the Industry Address, Info Sessions, Content Theater and Destination Broadband Theater and Exhibits,” then click this short link – http://ow.ly/13T8Q or register at http://nabshow.com/register with the code A913.

Enjoy! Maybe I’ll see you in Vegas. Tweet your experience to @mediadude.

If we divide Pandora’s AAS by the US population, we’ll have their rating. The 12+ population of the US is about 256 million, so Pandora’s national rating is something like 0.1. It might be a little higher in some markets, a little lower in others, but on average Pandora has the same average listenership as a typical niche programmed AM station, ranked outside the top 20.

This ties into my earlier point about Pandora’s time spent listening. There’s a lot of tune-in to Pandora, but not a lot of stickiness.

Read the Harker Research piece here.

But the really interesting bit is that Pandora listeners spend less than an hour with the service for each session, on average. In comparison, Cox Radio’s streaming listeners spend over two hours for each session, Saga and Citadel’s spend considerably more than 3 hours.

There has been a lot of talk about the stickiness of Pandora, but these numbers expose the fact that the service is cool, but boring. People are finding that the streams from broadcasters like Saga, Cox, Citadel, CBS and Clear Channel are more than twice as engaging.

As more streaming moves from the home and office to the car, it will be interesting to see how these numbers play out. For example, will Pandora listeners bring their listening to the car? The stats will show those connections as additional session starts. For listeners of terrestrial stations who use the stream when in the office and listen to the same station in the car, the behavior might well be to forgo listening on IP devices and revert to the car radio. This will be a complicated behavior to measure; PPM is probably the only tool that can do it.

The complete pdf of the Ando Media January report is available by clicking this link.

Writing about marketing so that his customers can see his thinking differentiates him from virtually every other radio sales person out there.

This is the kind of person that is the future of radio – forward thinking and ready to tackle the marketing of his customers businesses with some marketing of himself. Hats off to Phil!

http://philbernstein.wordpress.com/

The government’s intrusion into the measurement of media audiences is fraught with problems, illustrated by this quote from the chairman of the committee – Congressman Ed Towns, from the second paragraph of the committee’s announcement:

“With an unprecedented decline in ratings among popular minority television and radio stations, we must explore the possibility of methodological flaws in the implementation of the PPM,” said Chairman Towns. “As it stands now, the current system jeopardizes the future of minority broadcasting.”

Congressman Towns, what connection would a “decline in ratings among popular minority television…stations” have to do with PPM? PPM only officially measures radio, and even if Arbitron did measure local TV, there could be no decline in ratings because there are no pre-ppm ratings from Arbitron to compare to!

Here’s more from this press release – pay attention to the bolded portion in particular:

Chairman Towns served a subpoena to the Media Ratings Council (MRC) in September 2009 for documents detailing its oversight of Arbitron’s use of the PPM, after Arbitron forbid MRC from releasing documents related to the Committee’s investigation. Although Arbitron promised full cooperation with the investigation, the company prohibited MRC from providing the Committee with any documents related to the PPM. Furthermore, Arbitron provided the Committee with insufficient documents that were either publicly available or biased toward the company.

So – the Congressman wants more documents that are “…publicly available or biased towards the company?” Huh?

This hearing should be interesting. Not because the subject is particularly compelling, but because it may be an illustration of exactly why government shouldn’t be involved with issues like the measurement of media exposure.

If Congressman Towns’ and the Committee’s statements are indicative of the way the hearing will proceed – discussions of why the PPM has reduced TV ratings and why Arbitron hasn’t provided the Committee with more publicly available or biased documents – then Congress will have wasted valuable treasure of time and resources.

Here’s a link to The Wall Street Journal’s Lauren Goode article and her interview with Bob Struble, CEO of Ibiquity.

This accessory has generated a fair amount of buzz around the internets. Many people are saying that one of the major selling points of the new Zune is the HD radio inside. Before today, I can’t remember anyone saying that.

This accessory is very similar to the analog FM radio accessory that has been available for iPods for years. It plugs into the accessory connector on the device. There’s a tuning control that you can use to navigate the radio’s presets which connects to the device through a wire. There’s also an app that you install from the iTunes store – free, but necessary for the HD Radio to function. The HD Radio dongle has an iTunes tagging feature so that you can identify songs you wish to purchase later by clicking a button on the tuning control.

I own the standard iPod FM radio; it is useful on trips when I want to monitor local radio and I am not in a rental car. It has an RDS display right on the iPod – which highlights to me how poorly stations are at implementing this potentially extremely valuable tool.

So – the questions are, will people pay $80 for a radio in their iPhone when they can purchase a portable HD radio for $50? And – do people really care about having a broadcast radio receiver in their iPhone/Touch when there are so many other options available to them via iPhone/Touch apps?

My guess is that until the software that drives the HD radio is integrated with a streaming radio application in such a way that I can choose my over-the-air HD radio station or my streaming audio channel with the click of a pre-set, this won’t be a very strong offering. There’s a lot of potential power in this app that resides on the iPhone’s desktop. Smart folks will figure out how to tap into it.

The physical clunkiness of the connection to the phone may also deter people from using it. The connection of the original iPod FM radio is almost exactly the same and I find that it’s annoying. The wires get in the way.

However, it’s a start. Let’s see how this goes – maybe we’ll be able to pick these up cheaply on eBay after Christmas!

I heard about the event on ‘RNR and decided to go. It was a great afternoon of music, food and fun – including a tug of war between Eastport and Annapolis.

‘RNR was there – with a logo-covered tent, a table with station merchandise, and lots of signage all around the venue. A fairly standard radio presence.

But – there was another media outlet there, doing something that the folks at ‘RNR could have very easily done.

The Sailing Channel video streamed the entire event live on uStream!

The Sailing Channel?

‘RNR could have done exactly the same thing – or, teamed up with The Sailing Channel – and really connected with their audience using a new media platform. All sorts of opportunities presented themselves – interviews with ‘RNR fans, the artists who performed on both the stage in Annapolis and Eastport, personality appearances with the winners.

‘RNR could have produced this, provided talent and imbedded the stream on their home page.

Radio needs to pay much more attention to these opportunities – or be marginalized by other media outlets like, well, The Sailing Channel.