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Depressing
- Thread starter johntherogger
- Start date
A snowbird could be on the panel if they are here for at least 6 months and 1 day. Many do this to qualify for Florida residency since we have no state income tax. Any time less would be ineligible.
Panel members are recruited based on the ability to stay on the panel for up to 24 months. Snowbirds don't qualify, and the screening for the panelists would virtually eliminate them all. Legal residency is not a panel requirement... it's simply whether a person is likely to be in the market for two years.
In any event, nearly all snowbirds are over 55, so even if a few got on the panel, no station would program to them as they are of zero sales value.
So imagine you are an advertiser thinking of advertising on radio in the Miami market. This means that the people who hear my ad will not accurately reflect those who actually hear it, since people who are there for less than two years don't count, and illegal immigrants do count. Radio's most basic problem is lack of confidence in measurement. Internet marketing is way behind radio in its ability to persuade people, but the confidence factor in analytics compared to radio ratings is far superior.
Since the 55 and older snowbird audience is not particularly desirable to advertisers, it really does not make any difference if they are measured or not.
Buyers who use ratings have pretty high confidence in ratings.
And with the market being over 70% Hispanic and Black, snowbirds are an increasingly small ultra-niche in the Miami MSA.
I think your last two comments were meant as a defense of radio measurement, but actually condemn it. Paraphrasing: "I acknowledge that they don't accurately measure the audience, but the people they miss are too old or too much of a niche to matter."
Well, sure. It would make no sense for someone who has confidence in ratings not to use them.
That's a mistaken interpretation.
Nielsen measures the local radio audience in Miami. It does not measure tourists, transients and temporary residents.
Ratings have pretty much one purpose, which is to provide a metric for the buying of advertising. In other words, ratings are bought by radio stations to be provided to ad agencies and major advertisers so they can make reasoned decisions.
In 55 years, I have never seen any significant interest in the measurement of transients. One of the reason is that this week's or month's transients are generally not next week's or next month's transients. And there is no accurate way of quantifying the transients in the market, either. So you can not project the behaviour of transients into the market's universe.
So an advertiser knows that the ratings done this month can be used with reasonable reliability to plan a buy for the Thanksgiving season or even for advance planning for an early 2015 buy.
The people they "miss", to use your term, are people who likely will not be listening or even in the market four or five months from now. So not trying to include transients makes the ratings more reliable.
And, in any market, there are essentially no transactional buys for audiences over 55. whether tourists, part time residents or 40-year "citizens" of South Florida... or any other market.
But since all transactional buys are, by definition, made using ratings, it is highly unlikely to find an agency account that does not put a significant trust in ratings. And that trust is greatly enhanced by the MRC audits and approval system for electronic media ratings and measurements.
There is no dispute about that, it doesn't. I'm simply unaware that Nielsen discloses this shortcoming. On it's website it says: "As the definitive source for comprehensive radio metrics and insights, Nielsen Audio has the beat on this dynamic and evolving industry. "
Radio stations, as you know, pay the bulk of the cost of producing them. They do this to sell advertising. They want to provide advertisers with "reasoned decisions" that lead them to buy radio.
I have. In markets where the number one industry is tourism. Lots of advertisers need to reach tourists while they are on vacation. A lot of those advertisers bought radio too. They were either unaware of the limits of radio rating methodology or they figured, with good reason, that there are so many tourists around we're bound to reach a lot of them.
This is true but your whole point-of-view is understandably radio-centric. If a marketer wants to reach someone outside radio's ability to measure, they simply buy other media. Internet advertising analytics has moved way beyond simply views, impressions and clicks and serves up ads based on geography, age, gender and more. Internet won't do what radio does, but there is a lot of confidence in its measurement.
Yep, very true. And those who lack confidence in radio ratings spend their money elsewhere and in recent years, that's exactly what they have been doing.
It's a safe assumption that users of ratings understand that temporary visitors will not be measured. In the diary era (and still in about 200 smaller markets), there was about a 3 week lead in to actually getting a diary once a household accepted, and then you had to have a mailing address to send them too. Transients would not be in the lists that Arbitron used to recruit participants, either.
I worked for the better part of three decades in two beachfront, tourist cities and do not recall ever, ever being asked about tourists or having the subject even come up in discussions of client marketing. Since both towns were very agency driven, what I did see was that the hotels, restaurants and attractions tended to use direct media, such as in-room magazines, tourist cable channels and the like (and now tourist city sites and such). Unless those same businesses also catered to locals, they did not use mass media.
I think the assumption... and a safe one... is that tourists are not going to know what stations to listen to and are likely to be very erratic or light users of radio. Direct targeting, via in-room literature and the new media equivalents, does not have the horribly expensive spillage that local radio and TV would have.
Not quite explaining why radio revenues are up from $12 billion to $17 billion in the last 5 years.
To avoid an endless back-and-forth, I'll skip any more refutations of other topics and deal with this one:
This highlights the real reason I am no longer in radio. It's not that I don't like it, or believe in audio-only advertising, I do. It's because so many people, chiefly the CEO's, won't acknowledge reality. It's all "everything's great" and "we just need to get our story out."
Last 5 years... that would be back to 2009. What happened in 2008? Oh, yeah, the worst U.S. economic disaster since the Great Depression. Out of that gaping hole, radio revenues have gone up. Except even to get to $17 Billion, they had to count $2.5 Billion of "Digital" and "Off-air" revenue i.e. "Not radio". Take out the "not radio" revenues and it''s gone nowhere in 5 years even coming out of the 2008 economic collapse. In 2008, radio revenue fell 9% to $19.5 Billion, and that was without digital. So, radio is still $2 Billion short of where it was in 2008. It was once over $20 Billion. And that's not taking inflation into account.
This highlights the real reason I am no longer in radio. It's not that I don't like it, or believe in audio-only advertising, I do. It's because so many people, chiefly the CEO's, won't acknowledge reality. It's all "everything's great" and "we just need to get our story out."
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Seems foolish to leave an industry because of what others say.
One thing I've learned in my time in the board room is there's a difference between what CEOs say publicly and what they do privately. I spend my time watching what they do. In the case of the most successful radio CEOs, they've spent the last five years building their online business and diversifying their platforms. They're not investing lots of money in their OTA platform, hiring lots of duplicate staff, and building new antenna towers. That says a lot.
I don't know who you are arguing with, except yourself.
All the major radio companies have recognized the shift to mobile from OTA and they have invested heavily in the digital platform. The fact that digital revenue will approach 20% of the industry's total this year indicates that the transformation is on and ongoing.
What is the failure of your argument is that you are not taking into account the fact that Pandora and iHeart and Uforia and Slacker and others are radio. That's because the user's perception is that they are radio. What is not useful is to cling to the idea that only AM and FM are radio.
If you look at radio revenue, including digital, as a percentage of the GNP (or the broad economic indicator of your choice) you will find that it has suffered less than many other traditional segments of the economy. That's because radio, which is about 100 years old, has moved into new technologies and has the potential for growth once it sheds the "steel in the air" mentality.[/SIZE][/FONT]
I don't think so. The station has been updating constantly, in an effort to become more 35-54 and less 55+. The adjustments in the format may have seemed to indicate what you describe, but I think the real issue was the process to lower the age appeal once they realized that there is no longer a significant 55+ or 65+ bubble in Miami.
I have no regrets. When theCEO assigns revenue goals based on his optimistic view of the business returning to where it was, and berates and belittles his team for failing to achieve his goals, the people who stick around are those with the fewest employment opportunities. I knew he didn't believe his own public comments because his actions didn't match.
Throwing in a random comment changing the focus from the discussion to an opinion about what you think I am doing is unpersuasive.
To simplify and clarify: Radio revenues, as defined by those on this board who have been arguing that digital isn't radio, are shrinking. It's share of advertising is dropping because advertising dollars continue to grow. My hypothesis is that one of the most significant reasons is that buyers, not just radio buyers but the larger universe of advertising buyers, know the ratings system is not reliable.
The very reason that digital is attractive to to traditional radio companies is that it is growing and one reason it is growing is that there is a high degree of confidence among advertisers in digital audience measurement.
My original coments was that radio ratings poor ratings measurement system was hurting sales. The rejoinder was that radio revenue is increasing but no mention of digital was included. Now that it is acknowledged that broadcast radio revenue is declining and that digital is required to keep even its meager increases going, we seem to have reached agreement.
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That may have been true three years ago, but it's not true any more.
The reason it's attractive to radio is because it's taking the same content and placing it on another platform. The reason it's attractive to advertisers is it's priced much lower than OTA. Like about 1/10th the price. It's targeted advertising. And you have the opportunity to get data directly from the people who view your advertising. Don't underestimate the value of that.
Sounds like the problem was the particular CEO, not what he was saying publicly. If it wasn't this that set him off, it was going to be something else.
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