PPM’s Convoluted Incentives
PPM’s Convoluted Incentives If a Nielsen PPM panelist wants the cash to keep coming, she or he has to do one thing: Keep the meter moving. The device that panelists carry has an accelerometer just like a Fitbit and other fitness tracking devices. In the same way a Fitbit can count your steps a PPM […]
Nielsen’s Fractured Fairytales
Time Spent per Occasion, TSPO for short. It’s a PPM metric that you have probably never heard about. You won’t find it in any of the Nielsen monthly market reports. It doesn’t appear in any Nielsen literature. To our knowledge the only time TSPO was shared with the radio community was in 2011 when Arbitron […]
Accuracy, Precision, and why Nielsen numbers deliver neither
It’s easy to confuse accuracy with precision. At first glance, they may seem to be similar or at least related. However, they are very different, particularly when it comes to radio ratings. Ratings can be accurate but not precise. Ratings can be precise and not accurate. And unfortunately for radio, Nielsen ratings are neither. To […]
Is Nielsen Picking Radio Format Winners & Losers?
Can a company measuring radio station listenership impact the success of music formats? It’s a question Harker Bos Group raised in 2007 when we learned that the largest 50 radio markets would no longer be measured via diary. Instead, with the new method, the Portable People Meter (PPM), stations would encode their programming with an […]
The Drip Drip Drip of Audience Churn
You may think that steady Nielsen numbers are a sign that the same listeners are tuning to you month after month, but that may not be true. We find that a radio station continually churns listeners, gaining new listeners at the same time it loses other listeners who have stopped listening. Even if your cume […]
When did “radio” become a dirty word?
Audacy recently released a great study on the personal connection listeners have between their lives and radio. We felt the report was well written, insightful, and a significant contribution to the industry. We encourage everyone in the industry to read and share it. One aspect of the study, however, made us uneasy. The word “radio” […]
Time to Make Local Radio Local Again
Radio group consolidation into the mega-groups we have now might be good for radio in some respects but it has done immense harm to local radio’s greatest strength. Good radio is local. It reflects the town it serves in both style and content. Local radio is an active integral part of the community woven into […]
Radio is not bowling. Don’t stay in your lane.
Radio is not bowling. One of radio’s most cringeworthy terms is the word “lane” as in, “we want to stay in our lane.” The term is most often used as a code for, “we don’t want to play that song.” We don’t believe it, but perhaps there was a time when radio stations needed to […]
Making Radio Relevant…Again
Disk jockey, personality, host, call them what you will, but virtually every radio station has them. But why? It’s presumably because stations believe that personalities can bring listeners to the station or keep people listening longer. But is it true anymore? A recent post here pointed out the outsized role DJs played in the 1970s. […]
When Radio DJs were the Influencers
Larry Lujack, Gary Owens, Charlie Tuna, Chuck Leonard, Wolfman Jack, Dick Biondi, Cousin Brucie, Real Don Steele, Tom Donahue, and Tony Pigg. If you’re new to radio, the names probably won’t mean anything to you. If you’ve been in radio a while, you probably grew up listening to some of them. They were some of […]