"David Eduardo" wrote:


Since we are talking about AM, and there are no AMs up on a frikkin'
mountain,

Actually, at this point we are talking about the selling of radio in
general.

My experience is that local listeners are FM listeners, unless they
are sports or talk radio. Yes, KOA does very well, but they have a
niche.

your whole point is bvery confusing. And no Denver FM covers down
to New Mexico.

Raton Pass. Look it up. I know my state, sir.

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.

Actually, I do know that. (Better tell Reg Edwards... but I
digress...) ...I also know that AM will fill the holes that FM
stations can't.

But FM, last time I checked, outperformed AM. (No doubt, measuring
the local market only...)


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.

Actually, I picked ones that I 1) personally knew about and 2) would
be common and unambiguous. For example, I didn't include the various
clear sodas -- Pepsi Ice? -- because I don't know if that was a test
market thing that bombed or a full-fledged rollout that bombed.

Yet marketing-driven items can, do and will fail. New Coke is the
perfect example of everything being done "right" by marketing
principles and it all went wrong.


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.

In other words, what they do doesn't reflect reality. Your "listner
or tow [sic]" is probably more like 10 here, 20 here, 5 there, adding
up to the hundreds to thousands.


You are trying to quantify on a grand scale something that does not matter:
night DX AM lisatening.

It doesn't even necessarily have to be night listening, and I do not
view the listener of MW BCB who does so purely for the program content
as "DX." Especially when it doesn't have to be that far. Growing up
in Cleveland, my parents' station was WJR, Detroit and mine was CKLW,
Detroit/Windsor.

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.

Because the listener count doesn't cross a certain threshold. The
problem is, though, that there are a *lot* of East Overshoes out
there. I'll say it again: No one is asking you to advertise East
Overshoe Laundramat; the idea is to be aware of the sales in the local
market that are created by non-local buyers.

So, statistically, it is not a factor even if in
reality one or tow people listen occasionally.

Statistically, your odds of winning the Lottery are 0. The odds of
someone winning the lottery, however, are quite high. But you are
saying that because the odds of any individual winning is 0, the odds
of someone winning must also be 0. It's a statistical fallacy.


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.

But that 3 or 4 might be much higher than that, but are pre-filtered
by Arbitron. The only "material change" that your advertisers care
about is someone who makes a sale. The guy who owns a Porche in
Needles certainly isn't going to Fred's Garage in Needles to get it
serviced -- he'll go to where it can be done, in LA. And your Porche
dealer advertising there might get his interest piqued.

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.

Perhaps -- that's a believable explanation. However, CKLW, targetting
the American audience, had to contend with PJB being a flamethrower on
that same frequency ALSO targetting an american audience. Usually
CKLW won out in the northern states, but I recall one evening of freak
atmospherics where CKLW was overwhelmed by PJB in Cleveland.




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.

It matters not a whit if the methodology is flawed. That's something
I'll never see because it's a closely guarded secret.


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.

The questions they could have asked were, "Have you lost telephone
service in the last year?" or "How many times have you needed to
contact qwest in the past 12 months for loss of telephone service?"
or "Was your telephone service restored within 3 days?" or "Was your
telephone service restored with only one service call placed?"
Feelings aren't measurable in such a survey. The above numbers are.


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.

(sigh) here we go again. You don't sell ads to a local Riverside /
San Bernadino location; you sell (and track) information regarding an
LA business which may also be of practical use outside of LA. Not to
Riverside, but *anyone* outside of LA. The example I come up with
again and again would be J&R advertising on WABC. J&R is a New York
City store with a national clientele. You should make use of that
fact. (J&R isn't the only one in the known universe with these
features.)


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.


That's why listeners hold Clear Channel in such high esteem? I recall
reading late last year how people have been flocking in droves to NPR,
looking for something -- *anything* -- worth listening to. When
you've chased your listener base to NPR, you've accomplished
something.

Oh, I know, Clear Channel will continue to thrive for a while, since
people *tolerate* -- not enjoy -- their product.


Look: You want a local audience? Use a local medium, like FM. We
should have done what Canada did and opened up a new, different band
solely dedicated to digital broadcasting without butchering up the two
BCBs we have. But we didn't. And now, people who complain will be
ignored because they aren't local listeners. But those people who
complain are real, just like your non-local listener base is real.
And you will lose them, along with the 10 people who don't complain
and just tune out.

--
Eric F. Richards

"This book reads like a headache on paper."
http://www.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/readi...one/index.html