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Shortcomings of PPM

landtuna

landtuna

Walk of Fame Participant
I have always wondered about PPM when it came to measuring active listening versus exposure and today I found an accomplice in that thought.

Dick Broadcasting, owner of two radio stations in North Carolina has reportedly dumped the PPM system for an older "technology" which measures audience and provides this quote as one of the reasons "We look forward to working with Eastlan Ratings to see who people in the Triad choose to listen to rather than who they are exposed to." The other complaint they had about PPM was the cost but it is the "listening" versus "exposure" that has always interested me and I have voiced that opinion several times over the years.

To me, if I owned a station, I would have the identical concern (cost notwithstanding). There is a profound difference between active listening (presumably to commercials as well as programming) as opposed to background noise which PPM does not differentiate between.

Comments?
 
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landtuna said:
I have always wondered about PPM when it came to measuring active listening versus exposure and today I found an accomplice in that thought.

To me, if I owned a station, I would have the identical concern (cost notwithstanding). There is a profound difference between active listening (presumably to commercials as well as programming) as opposed to background noise which PPM does not differentiate between.

Comments?
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Agencies pushed radio to accept the PPM as they wanted a measurement of exposure. Agencies are not concerned with how much a person likes a station or some warm and fuzzy radio quality. They care who is exposed to their campaigns. So they pretty much forced the PPM on radio, including about a 60% rate increase.

It will be interesting to see how many agency buys Dick (who?) Broadcasting gets with Eastlan. If agencies are buying the market using Nielsen, pitches based on non-currency data will be ignored and the agency will buy everyone off their own Nielsen "tapes" anyway.
 
Interesting decision. This company owns two well rated stations: WKRR and WKZL in Greensboro-Winston Salem NC, which is a PPM market. Their two stations account for about 13% of the listening in the market as of April. Perhaps they don't do much national business. I'm sure they're saving money using Eastlan. But I'm not expecting this to be a trend.
 
landtuna said:
CEO is Allen Dick.
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I'm aware of Dick Broadcasting. My "who?" comment was based on this being a very small company with two stations. "Dick" used to own a bunch more, including markets like Nashville and Knoxville (the legendary KIVK). In 2000, they sold 15 stations to Citadel for about $300 million!

Interestingly, when that big sale happened, James Dick took $6 million and split it among the stations' staff members. An unusual and rather amazing act.

The two stations they still have have been owned since 1985 and 1992, or over 30 years each.

The founder of Dick Broadcasting passed away in 2011. I believe the two stations are now run by his son.

While they may be making a statement, unless others follow suit this is just an attempt to save money.

Arbitron became the "currency" for agency radio buys in the early 70's because they got buy-in by the ad agencies. Stations trying to sell with Hooper or Pulse found that the agencies increasingly did not look at that data. So eventually, those other two companies folded and Arbitron became the agency buyers' resource.[/SIZE][/FONT][/QUOTE]
 
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I agree with David that this is risky strategy. Greensboro/Winston-Salem/High Point is Market #46. So I assume Top 40 WKZL (#6 in the recent ratings) and Classic Rock WKRR (#7) get a good deal of national and regional buys, based on ratings. But I guess Dick Broadcasting, after selling off most of its stations for $300 million, can afford to be mavericks.

Any rating system is going to have flaws. Diaries required people to remember and write down what they listened to. So the strongest, household-name stations in a given market probably got more credit than they deserved. People Meters record exposure, whether you're really listening or just are in a location where the station is playing. But it's still the better system.

I often wonder, should News, Talk and Sports stations get more credit because people are really listening to them carefully? Meanwhile music stations can play in the background and we may never really pay attention to the commercials that air, many in a row, so they become audio wallpaper. Yet they must be making an impression. I doubt radio ads on music stations would sell so well if they weren't bringing in the customers. Advertisers would have found out by now that, even on a highly rated station, people aren't paying attention. They must be paying attention.
 
Gregg. said:
I agree with David that this is risky strategy.
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I don't know if it is or isn't but consider the following:

Gregg. said:
Any rating system is going to have flaws. Diaries required people to remember and write down what they listened to. So the strongest, household-name stations in a given market probably got more credit than they deserved. People Meters record exposure, whether you're really listening or just are in a location where the station is playing. But it's still the better system.
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Agree with the first statement, and possibly the 2nd but not the last. PPM cannot measure anything except exposure. If that is what the agencies want then it does suit their purpose but they would need some other way to measure the commercial's success/penetration (increased queries/sales etc.).

Gregg. said:
I often wonder, should News, Talk and Sports stations get more credit because people are really listening to them carefully?
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I would think it human nature that listening to News, Talk and Sports would take more intentional listening than listening to music so yes, I agree with your opinion. These stations also tend to segue from content right into commercials so by the time you realize you are listening to a commercial you might be "hooked".

Personally, I find those genre's very irritating so don't listen to them but then I am no longer in any desired demo.
 
Gregg. said:
I often wonder, should News, Talk and Sports stations get more credit because people are really listening to them carefully? Meanwhile music stations can play in the background and we may never really pay attention to the commercials that air, many in a row, so they become audio wallpaper. Yet they must be making an impression. I doubt radio ads on music stations would sell so well if they weren't bringing in the customers. Advertisers would have found out by now that, even on a highly rated station, people aren't paying attention. They must be paying attention.
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About a year of when the PPM became currency, Arbitron put together a committee of representatives of mayor advertisers, agencies, buying services and radio groups. The purpose of the committee was to determine whether, within the structure of the PPM and the data it delivered, a metric could be developed to define engagement.

I had the privilege of serving on that committee and the work consisted of looking at different analytics of how people use radio. Without going into specifics, which were covered by a NDA, I can give some broad stroke views.

The PPM reveals much more secondary listening than the diary. This is not what most people think... accidental listening for a moment or two in a store, which happens often but not for much time so has very little impact on the book. What is significant is the listening to people's second or third favorite station... the one they are not as likely to remember when writing in a diary. So those stations lots of folks listen to but which may not be as many people's first choice tend to do well in the PPM as memory is not involved.

When looking for engagement, we might want to see in how many dayparts and how many days a week a person listens. A "forced" at work station might not be ever listened to outside work hours or at home. An accidentally heard station would not be detected multiple times on multiple days of the week. So from the dayparts, occasions and days, we could see which stations engaged listeners at all moments of their lives.

The problem is that high rated stations engage well and very low rated ones tend not to be, even when adjusting for limited geography. So the top stations tend to be the most engaging. And AC stations are as engaging to certain listeners as classic rock or news. It all depends on the taste of the listener; a non-user of talk is not going to be more engaged by spoken word programming.

What's key to understanding the PPM ratings is that just 50% of station users give the station over 90% of its listening time. The other half of the cume are, for some reason or another, very light users. So any focus on things like a station being detected by a PPM in a store are irrelevant and immaterial.

So really, that half of the listening group to any station that gives almost all the quarter hour listening is, in their way, engaged and attentive.
 
landtuna said:


Interesting. Is there some way to inform PPM when the listener is at work or some other substantial activity?
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No. The PPM knows when it is Home and when it is away. It can't distinguís be tweet vehículo and work listening, though.
 
DavidEduardo said:



No. The PPM knows when it is Home and when it is away. It can't distinguís be tweet vehículo and work listening, though.
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Sorry for the confusing post. I seem to have been attacked by my Spanish spell checker and the result was somewhat bizarre.

"... it can't distinguish between vehicle and work listening" is how that should have read-

I should have mentioned that in the nearly 200 non-PPM diary-based markets surveyed by Nielsen, participants indicated where listening took place by home, in the car, at work or other ("other" being a park, the beach, out walking, etc.)

If the respondent does not mark a listening location, it defaults to "at home". For this reason, the in-home percentage in the diary is a bit higher than in the pPM.
 
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I didn't realize this was the same family as the owners of the Knoxville stations. There was still some litigation with Johnny Pirkle which apparently held up the sale of 100.3 to Journal (now E.W. Scripps) for awhile over the LMA they had that went to Citadel.
 
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