"Eric F. Richards" wrote in message
...
"David Eduardo" wrote:


...and therein lies the problem. You aren't looking for listeners who
buy -- you are looking for listeners who are densely packed. It ain't
called "target-casting," it's "broadcasting."

Radio and print and TV are mass media. They loolk for "people" and there is
no way of knowing which ones are ready to buy.

You are making assumptions about the ability to know the listener at the
granular level, one by one. There is no economical way to do this. This is
why ratings are a poll, not a census.

Going into another medium, the direct mail response rate is seldome even 1%
even with the most targeted mailing lists. Still, given cost, that is cost
effective. the same is true with radio. Advertisers can narrow down choicdes
by knowing the age appeal of thier product vs the appeal of stations, and
select accordingly. Other than that, they really have little to deal with as
to the desire to buy of the listeners of radio or one station as this may
change from day to day or hour to hour.


Boulder, etc., are in the Denver MSA.

Now go to the FCC site and pull a coverage map for Denver based
stations. Boulder is in a valley -- a signal hole, invisible to
Lookout Mountain, where many Denver broadcasters live. They can't
cover Boulder for crap. They can and do, however, cover all the way
down to New Mexico.

As I said before, each market only has a few, a very few, AMs that fully
cover it. That goes for Denver, or Cleveland or LA. In fact, due to urban
sprawl, Washington DC has not had a single viable AM in this respect for the
last 30 years or so. Only those stations, like KOA, will be fully
competitive because they cover the market. the rest willhave to figure out
niche or brokered options to survive.

Since we are talking about AM, and there are no AMs up on a frikkin'
mountain, your whole point is bvery confusing. And no Denver FM covers down
to New Mexico.

You do know that the ideal AM site is in salt water, right? Lacking that, it
is in the lowest, flattest, wettest, most orgnic soil possible. FMs and TVs
love mountains of the 2000 foot creations of Stainless, but not AMs.

Again we are talking about AM out of market skywave coverage. Coverage
which, in Denver, exists on only one station... KOA.


...and we all know from personal experience that marketing always
reflects reality, right?

Yeah, it usually does.

Which is why New Coke did so well, the Ford Edsel was a rip-roaring
success, the Chevy Miata is hailed as a great move by GM and Robert
Macnamara will go down in history as the greatest market researcher
ever.

It is telling that you had to go back 50 years for one of your examples.
There are always misses. The case study for consumer research and being
driven by the marketing mode is Procter & Gamble... they create hundreds of
new products a year, actually test market a significant percentage (that
means they make the product and distribute it in isolated markets to see how
it does) and roll out dozens. Yet as many as half do not last 3 years.
Consumer tastes change, and sometimes initial impressions do not create long
term usage. This is why companies try to have many products under
development.

Oh, and no one reads the comic strip Dilbert, because its descriptions
of corporate life are pure fantasy.

Some are real, some are exaggerations. And many of us work in companies
where none of that is true. Mostly,comic strips are exaggerations of real
life.

Good thing, too, because I bet that a seller -- that is, a buyer of
advertising time -- on WLW knows how many units they move in East
Overshoe, that place that doesn't exist in your world.

But, even if they do get a listener or tow at night outside the Cicny MSA,
they do not quantify the sales that way. They look at the sales by region
and city and the local ad expenditures to determine effectiveness of the ad
campaign.

You are trying to quantify on a grand scale something that does not matter:
night DX AM lisatening. You can go through the Arbitron diaries for east
Overshoe (every US county is rated at least once a year) and you will not
find that WLW gets ratings. So, statistically, it is not a factor even if in
reality one or tow people listen occasionally.

When you have, for example, 1.6 million listening to KFI in the LA market,
the fact that maybe 3 or 4 people listened in Needles or Barstow or Bishop
or somewhere way off in the wilderness is totally insignificant. Does not
make a material change in eithe KFI or the people who hear ads on KFI.

And, in most places in the Southwest, Mexican staiton interference has made
the usefullness of clears on skywave pretty limited in the last few decades
(KFI and KNX are unlistenable 150 miles from LA, for example) and in the
Southeast, Cubans and caribbean stations chew up WSB and WLW and stations
like that most nights of the year... another reason why these stations do
not even try to serve out of market listener groups.

In fact, the product was probably developed today by a company tha tis
in marketing mode as opposed to the older production mode model. As such,
the rpduct was designed with user input, and then marketed to the
greatest
potential users.

That's true. But it doesn't affect how radio people intentionally
misunderstand their audience.

We do not misunderstand our daudiences We just have to, for economic
reasons, ignore that portion that is not inside our own market metro.


It's still a helluva way to run a railroad, no matter what you say
about it.

Your misunderstanding of the way radio is listened to is monumental,

Um, no.

*I* listen. Do you? Do you even know listeners, or do you only know
the arbitron numbers, those that only reflect listeners "above a
certain threshold" per ZIP code?

I spend at least half my time in direct contact with listeners or
supervising others who are. I travel between 17 US markets, and we see in
person at least 10 thousand listeners a year, and talk to anoother 200,000
or more users of our "variety" of radio by phone, conducting interviews with
all of them using a staff of about 50 an a budget that is about 6 times
greater than the billing of the average radio station in the US. Yes, we
know our listeners very well.

Your methodology reminds me of an old joke about a physicist studying
prime numbers: "1 doesn't count... 2 is prime, 3 is prime, 4 is...
NOT prime, 5 is prime. 4 must be experimental error, therefore all
integers are prime."

Except that we do extensive field research on a monumental level.

Your results remind me once again how detached marketing is from
reality. Some years back, I got contacted by a telephone marketing
survey, wanting to study people's opinions of US-West, now Qwest, the
most wretched phone company I've ever had to deal with. Because they
wanted hard, measurable data, they asked a series of yes-no questions
about quest. Not a single question was asked about the quality or
reliability of their service. Not one. After about 5 minutes of
yes-no questions on total irrelevency, "In your opinion, have the
operators at US-west been polite and friendly?" I said, nicely but in
exasperation, "You haven't asked the right question yet." They never
did.

Irrelevant. Your experience with Quest and the purposes of the survey were
at odds. Maybe the did not want to know your feelings, just your actual
behaviour... in other words, don't tell me what you feel, tell me what you
actually did.

Union members supposedly reject the labor policies, offshoring and health
care policies of WalMarth. Yet 70% of labor union members recently surveyed
shopped at walMart despite that. In other words, a survey based on feelings
would say labor union menbers despise WalMart. And it would not show that
nearly all of them shop there anyway. You have to pin down real behaviour,
not guesses. Consumers can tell you what they have done a lot better than
what they will do... this is why historians are respected and fortune
tellers are not.

And neither do you.

We do all the time. You just will never see proprietary research.

and the
basis for your failure to get the way advertising is bought.

I get it. I get it just fine. Just like I "get" The Flat Earth
Society.

Radio is mostly
listened to in the daytime.

Sure -- drive time. What your next biggest listening period outside
of rush hour?

Listening is pretty flat form 6 AM to 7 PM. there are small peaks in 6 to 10
and 3 to 7, but they are minor. Since 70% of listening is at home or at
work, the short in-car intervals are overwhelmed by in home and at work
listening, where more time is available. In fact, in some makrets, like New
York, less than 25% of listening is in cars!

It is nearly 100% listened to in the very
strongest signal contours of FM and AM stations.

By your massaged, filtered numbers, yes. But you are filtering a
large number of people out of your survey. They, to you, are down in
the noise, in the insignificant digits range. But that "noise," added
up, makes a significant bloc of people.

I am not filtering anyone out. If you look at any station, and look at where
the diary returns come from by work and home location, you find that most
listening is inside the very prime contours. in metros, where AM noise
levels are high, about 80% to 85% comes from within the 10 mv/m contours. On
FM, it is within the 64 dbu contour. Very little is left outside those
contours.

Then you can check if your station showed up in any market area that is not
your home market area. In the whole US, only a few hundred out of 13,500
radio stations showed up outside the home market.

Arbitron is very liberal on what it takes to "show" in a market. You only
have to appear in 10 diaries and register a certain number of quarter hours
of listening to "show" yet, except for contiguous markets on groundwave for
AM, AMs do not show in distant markets because there is just not anyone
listening. Again, radio listening at night is about 4 times lower than
daytime levels so the chances of finding listeners is much harder.

Add to that the fact that there are very few stations on reasonably clear
frequencies that can be reliably heard and listened to on skywave (the
number is a few dozen out of 5000 AM stations) and all these staitons are
programming to local audiences because that is where the big money comes
from and you have no listeners of significance outside the groundwave
coverage areas.

Advertisers only use local
stations to reach local audiences,

Either because you won't sell them the time, or they are a local
product (like a bar or a pizza joint), or, gawd help us all, they
*believe* people like you.

Buying is top down. Advertisers decide what ages, geographies, markets they
will use. They tell their ad agency what to buy, and they determine the
media mix. Radio simply provides the time.

Radio will sell time to most anything legal. But I have never personally
seen a single buy come down for skywave or out of market listeners in the
last 45 years or so. Major advertisers advertise by the market. Their entire
distribution system is generally regionalized by market and zone, and so are
ad budgets. Even national media, like network TV and cable, is allocated by
market based on population.

as they depend on more than on air
advertising as part of an ad buy, and out of town stations do not do
merchandising, promotion or remotes or shows or club appearances or taste
testings or mystery shopper promotions or whatever outside their own
market
where 99.999999999999% of their listeners are anyway.

...all of the above are irrelevent and gimmicery. I personally have
never gone to see a remote. I certainly wouldn't, say, go buy a car
based on a remote. But then, I consider myself to be above average
intelligence -- maybe the below-average Joe or Jane *will* buy a car
because KSUX is doing a remote at the local chevy outlet.

The fact is, most ad buys include some type of merchandising or direct
support services. It may be something you do not see, like letters to all
retailers in a market area saying that Client So and So is advertising on my
station, so you had better stock up and give the product good facings to
satisfy increased demand... or a contest to give away samples... or cupons
done at van hits... or an endorsement by talent... or something that
enhances the ad buy and is purely localized.

I can not send talent or vans or whatever to Moreno Valley. Doing so would
take 8 hours, including travel time. I could do 4 hits in LA metro in the
same time, and that benefits me. It is about logistics, signal and listening
patterns.

Oh, and, "99.999999999999%"? Are you sure? You referred to

The LA staiton I referred to has over 1.2 million weekly listeners

...so a single listener not recorded by your beloved Arbitrons would
be far more than the 0.000000000001% needed to break your percentage.

I was engaging in the same hyperbole you are using.



But you know that. Your station is a top 5 in a market it refuses to
sell to. Because they don't exist, according to your beloved numbers.

LA ad rates on major staitons are in the $1000 to $2000 per spot range. In
Riverside / San Bernardino, the Inland Empire separate market, the local
staitons sell for from $60 to a bit over $100 a spot. There is no way I can
go in there and offer $2000 spots for the #5 station when the #1 staiton
sells for $100 a spot. And that is why major metro stations do not sell in
fringe markets, even if they cover them partly or fully.

Once again, because I need to spell these things out for you, I'm not
suggesting you sell bar X outside of your home market. But if you can
place ads for companies that do mail order work, or are a chain, or
otherwise aren't tied to a geographic element, why not do so?
"Because we don't work that way," is a ****-poor answer.

Almost all Mail Order is PI. We do not talke PI, as the returns are
miserable and it is better to play more music or do more talk than to fill
the staiton up with non-productive ads that detract fromt he entertainment
value.

Chain stores or national products buy ads through agencies. They buy by the
market. If you are an LA station and mention Riverside ratings, they say,
"but I am buying you for LA, not Riverside. When I buy Riverside, and you
want to sell me more spots for $60, give us a ring."

I reiterate: Thinking inside your tiny little box will probably doom
traditional broadcast-band radio.

Don't feel too bad, though, you have company: Clear Channel thinks
that selling the most bland mush will keep radio going because it fits
into their market surveys of what people want.

Clear Channel and its component parts literally saved AM radio. In fact, the
name of the company reflects on its first purchase, WOAI in San Antonio, a
bankrupt AM. They expanded by buying good AMs even in places like Wyoming
and Montana and putting on good talk programming and, for all practical
purposes, creating or significantly contributed to the model that saved AM.