The radio ratings process is broken. Ridiculous things continue to happen in all market sizes. Meanwhile, broadcasters continue to pay millions of dollars into an archaic system that becomes less reliable each quarter. And so, The Ratings Game continues.
Every market has stories about crazy swings traced to a household or two. At the same time, management continues to freak out over monthly moves as programmers adjust the station based on unreliable data. But how ridiculous is the rating system? Imagine a stadium packed with 70,000 people. 150 fans are gathered in one section. They’re of various ages, genders, and races. Several languages are spoken, live in different areas, and belong to different socio-economic classes. Would it make sense to ask these 150 people a series of questions and draw conclusions to represent the entire stadium? What useful information could be learned about eating habits or car preferences? Or what magazines they read, what social media they use, and whether they’re iPhone or Android users. The data would be useless. Nobody would consider it a representative sample.
Yet the broadcast industry allows the rating companies to get away with this. Except the data is even worse.
The Radio Ratings Process is Broken
The rating company recruits a sample by direct mail, door-to-door visits, or telephone.
How many people do you know who would pick up the phone when an unknown number calls, answer the door for a stranger who wants something from them, or open junk mail?
In a PPM market, respondents must carry a device for a year (or more) to record their listening behavior. Seriously, who’s going to do that? Real people? Of course not.
So, to increase the sample, each respondent is expected to ask other household members to participate.
Consultant, researcher, and programming guru Dennis Constantine says:
Any good researcher will tell you that you should never have two people in a study that know each other. That’s why we don’t just invite a group of friends or family members together to a perceptual study or music test. Yet, radio ratings invite the whole family – sometimes up to 8 members of a family. And then, they play games with the participants to get them to listen more. The more you listen, the more money you make. Results are that one diary or one family can make or break a radio station.
It is anything but a representative sample.
The Impact of A Single Meter
Maybe that’s why the placement of a single meter caused a 38% increase for a station on a market’s ratings. It happened to one of my client stations (in our favor). This is shocking but is more common than it should be. Here are the facts in this case:
It’s a major market, in the top 20 in the USA, with 32 rated radio stations in the metro.
In one month, the station’s online stream grew from 0.0 to 4.2 among 18-34 women. The online stream was the 10th highest-ranked station in the market. The over-the-air signal was tied for #1 with an 11.1 share. The shares add up to a 15.3. That’s an incredible gain of 38%.
A deep dive into the data revealed that the online growth came from a single meter. One respondent raised the station’s ratings by 38%. Four shares from one meter? This should never happen, no matter how narrow the demographic is.
The Sample
Imagine deciding the direction of a radio station in a market of 2 million people. You will base your future on information from a perceptual research project to measure the brand’s health, current opportunities, and available positions in the market. The goal is to succeed with 18-34 women. The report comes back with the following sample:
W 18-24: 58 respondents
W 25-34: 89 respondents
Total W 18-34: 147 respondents
This doesn’t consider ethnicity, primary language spoken, or listening preferences. It includes rock fans, country fans, jazz fans, Christian music listeners, and hip-hop fans. Would you stake your career on this data? If the target is 18-24-year-old women, 58 responses aren’t enough for a valid sample to make weekly music decisions, even if they were screened by music genre and station preference.
I don’t know of a single research company that would present this sample to a broadcaster. Yet this is the actual in-tab sample for this market of over 2 million. 58 women aged 18-24 carry meters that determine the ratings for all stations in the market.
Conclusion
This research is the basis for millions of dollars in advertising, and broadcasters are paying a lot of money for the data on which we base ad rates. There is no solution to Nielsen’s sample crisis, but this must stop before advertisers wake up and realize what their ad rates have been based on.
It sounds ridiculous because it is. The radio ratings process is broken.
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