On Sat, 7 Jun 2008 14:35:40 -0700, "David Eduardo"
wrote:

It's really very simple. Ask anyone with access to ratings data to do a run
on 12+ cume share for a combo created out of the three mentioned AMs in SF.
They reach about 1 in ten persons, no more.

Oh, come on now! I've pretty much stayed out of this so far but the
broadcasting industry has far less of a clue with respect to the
demographics and numbers of its listeners than it and you would have
us believe - and this applies to television as well as radio.

To begin with, ratings are based on paper surveys, which of course are
kept by only a small percentile of the total number of listeners in
any given area, who are participating in the ratings "sweep" (Arbitron
typically passes out between one and four thousand paper surveys in a
given market) - and then, of course, the results are tabulated from
the surveys that listeners return (How many listeners simply toss them
into the nearest waste basket as soon as they receive them?).

Whast this means is that you are getting data from only a fragment of
a fragment of the total potential audience. This may fool broadcasters
(who could really care less what the listeners want and are only
interested in selling advertising), and it may fool advertisers (who
could really care less what the listeners want and are only interested
in how many listeners their ads will reach), but it doesn't fool
listeners - many of whom change the station the instant the
commercials come on anyway, so when a survey asks them if they heard
the Burger King commercial on WWTF at 8:45 PM on Saturday night, the
answer is no, not because they weren't listening to WWTF at 8:44, but
because they STOPPED listening to WWTF at 8:45 when the commercials
came on.

Of course, the surveys also rely on the listeners remembering
everything they listened to during the period. This from people who
generally have no idea who the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
is and can't remember what they had for lunch yesterday.

And don't bother to tell me about the new PPMs, either. It's already
known that they have problems measuring stations with niche audiences,
and their sample size is even smaller than that of survey-based sweeps
(and anybody who knows Jack Schmidt about statistics can tell you that
a good way to make bad decisions is to base them on numbers that are
the result of too small a sample size). Also, like the paper surveys,
these devices measure exposure, not attention.

Here's how a typical commercial broadcast radio listener behaves
today: Turns on the radio. Whatever station the radio happens to be
tuned to when it is powered up is what the listener hears first. If
the listener is looking for a particular program (maybe the broadcast
of that day's baseball game), and it's on that station at that time,
fine, otherwise ZAP the station gets changed.

Let's say the listener tunes into...Rush Limbaugh for example. At the
top of the hour when they take time out for the commercials, guess
what? ZAP the station gets changed, listeners know EXACTLY how long it
will be before Rush comes back on, and they don't bother listening to
the crap that's on in between.

If the listener wants to listen to rock music and the station's
playing rap instead, ZAP the station gets changed, and keeps getting
changed until the listener finds music that's acceptable to him/her.
If the station's playing rock, and the listener wants to hear rock,
the listener stays...until the first commercial or a rap song comes on
and then ZAP the station gets changed.

That's the problerm with your ratings - you have no numbers that
matter. As Thom Mocarsky, the vice president of communications at
Arbitron, stated in Media Life Magazine, "Neither the diary nor the
PPM measures attentiveness."

JK