"David Eduardo" wrote:


"Eric F. Richards" wrote in message
...

I guarantee you that within a 10 mile radius of where I live, the
median and mean incomes are far, FAR above the Denver metro area,
where advertisers following your model will target.

The Denver radio market is made up of 7 counties. I am pretty sure your area
is inside it. The only other separately bought markets nearby are Puebo,
Colorado Springs and Ft. Collins - Greeley. Each is a separate marekt area.

I would be in the Ft. Collins - Greeley market. However, there are
far more listeners to Denver stations in Ft. Collins than there are
Ft. Collins listeners -- at least in my experience.

I'm in Larimer County, BTW.

In the area described above, I wouldn't be surprised if the median
income is 80k (or higher).



For that matter, I guarantee you that if you swept a ring 10 miles
wide with its inner edge 50 miles outside of Denver around denver,
that median and mean income collection would also be higher than the
Metro area.

I ran this in Mapquest and the more rural you get, the more incomes goe
down.

Mapquest tells incomes of the area being plotted?

I would believe that in the eastern counties -- Adams, for example --
the income goes down. But coverage of The NW side -- Boulder, Grand,
Broomfield, etc. it will be very high. I think Castle Rock is
probably a wash. SW side is high-priced again.


In any case, that data is irrelevant. Radio advertising, whether local,
regional or national, is bought by market and the people who design
campaigns know all this stuff. what they also realize is that the best way
to reach listeners is on local stations as they have the ability to provide
added value locally.

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

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

--
Eric F. Richards

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

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


The Denver radio market is made up of 7 counties. I am pretty sure your
area
is inside it. The only other separately bought markets nearby are Puebo,
Colorado Springs and Ft. Collins - Greeley. Each is a separate marekt
area.

I would be in the Ft. Collins - Greeley market. However, there are
far more listeners to Denver stations in Ft. Collins than there are
Ft. Collins listeners -- at least in my experience.

But try to understasnd, whether that is true or not, advertisers buy each
market separately.

I'm in Larimer County, BTW.

In the area described above, I wouldn't be surprised if the median
income is 80k (or higher).

Very few ad campaigns are income based, as most are for mass market products
and services. Specific high income ZIPs or areas having other
characteristics are usually targeted by direct mail or other more thightly
focused medium.

Mapquest tells incomes of the area being plotted?

The Arbitron application based on it goes right down to listening habits and
income and family size, ttc.

I would believe that in the eastern counties -- Adams, for example --
the income goes down. But coverage of The NW side -- Boulder, Grand,
Broomfield, etc. it will be very high. I think Castle Rock is
probably a wash. SW side is high-priced again.

Boulder, etc., are in the Denver MSA. And radio is NOT bought on the ZIP
code level. It is mass media, and used for reach and frequency, not the sort
of thing that direct mail, etc. do better.

In any case, that data is irrelevant. Radio advertising, whether local,
regional or national, is bought by market and the people who design
campaigns know all this stuff. what they also realize is that the best
way
to reach listeners is on local stations as they have the ability to
provide
added value locally.

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

Yeah, it usually does. The companies that advertise usually know a lot more
about the user of the product and its marketing goals than a radios station
does. 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.

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, and the
basis for your failure to get the way advertising is bought. Radio is mostly
listened to in the daytime. It is nearly 100% listened to in the very
strongest signal contours of FM and AM stations. Advertisers only use local
stations to reach local audiences, 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.

In article ,
"David Eduardo" wrote:

Snip

Your misunderstanding of the way radio is listened to is monumental,
and the basis for your failure to get the way advertising is bought.
Radio is mostly listened to in the daytime. It is nearly 100%
listened to in the very strongest signal contours of FM and AM
stations. Advertisers only use local stations to reach local
audiences, 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.

I have heard that a big portion of the AMBCB advertising market is rush
hour traffic times in the local market. True?

--
Telamon
Ventura, California

"Telamon" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"David Eduardo" wrote:

Snip

Your misunderstanding of the way radio is listened to is monumental,
and the basis for your failure to get the way advertising is bought.
Radio is mostly listened to in the daytime. It is nearly 100%
listened to in the very strongest signal contours of FM and AM
stations. Advertisers only use local stations to reach local
audiences, 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.

I have heard that a big portion of the AMBCB advertising market is rush
hour traffic times in the local market. True?

6 Am to 7 PM is where nearly all the ad buys are placed.

Listening levels are pretty similar throughout those 13 hours. Only 30% of
radio listening is in cars, while the bulk is at work and in home.

"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.

I am about 600 miles northeast of WHO Des Moines 1040 and hear them on
skywave until they fade out. I like to listen to Don Thompson's
breakfast program on Sunday morning (7am-8 cst). I find it a delightful
mix of music of the 50's/60's, reminiscences of Hollywood, and pleasant
talk. I have to report that in the introduction, Don greeted listeners
from COAST to COAST and metioned a few towns around the country.
Horrors! Heresy! Why is this station greeting dx'ers who won't show up
on their ratings book. Are they mad? Eduardo says profit
maximize...don't let a cost escape your eyes. WHO is fading out early
these days but I did note two commercials: one for a function at the
Iowa State Fairgrounds and another announcing a tour of the Canadian
maritimes. Whoda thunk it? A station not only greeting am dx'ers but
encouraging them.
With reference to CFRX. They use a Harris 1kw transmitter and I
would guess that the electric cost would be about $100 a month. They
also have an active support group that handles QSL's.

"ve3..." wrote in message
oups.com...
I am about 600 miles northeast of WHO Des Moines 1040 and hear them on
skywave until they fade out. I like to listen to Don Thompson's
breakfast program on Sunday morning (7am-8 cst). I find it a delightful
mix of music of the 50's/60's, reminiscences of Hollywood, and pleasant
talk. I have to report that in the introduction, Don greeted listeners
from COAST to COAST and metioned a few towns around the country.
Horrors! Heresy! Why is this station greeting dx'ers who won't show up
on their ratings book. Are they mad?

It is really hard to keep talent from wanting to mention distant listeners,
and it does add a "bigness" if not overdone. Essentially, it is a fallback
to decades past when there were fewer stations in more rual areas and folks
had to listen to distant signals.

WHO, like regional signals such as WMT, WNAX, KFYR and KFGO, used to be huge
billing stations based on thier agricultural coverage. As the owner operated
family farm dwindled, and farmers could get weather and commodity prices on
pagers and cell phones, agribusiness advertising has fallen about 90% from
the 60's.

So you are hearing the end of an era on one of the few 1-A stations that has
enormous groundwave coverage (due to conductivity in the prairie states).
Few other stations do this or care. And, I believe, WHO was always the
smallest of the 1-A clear channels in terms of listenership and revenues.

Remember, there are only a handful of stations with as much protection as
WHO. 640, 650, 660, 670, 700, 720, 750, 760, 770, 780, 820, 830, 840, 870,
880,890, 1020, 1030, 1040, 1100, 1120, 1160, 1180, 1200 and 1210 are all
there are vs. nearly 5000 AMs that can not provide regular, reliable skywave
today.

Eduardo says profit
maximize...don't let a cost escape your eyes. WHO is fading out early
these days but I did note two commercials: one for a function at the
Iowa State Fairgrounds and another announcing a tour of the Canadian
maritimes. Whoda thunk it? A station not only greeting am dx'ers but
encouraging them.

If I am not mistaken, the IA state fair takes place within the groundwave
coverage area of WHO, and a tour to visit the maritimes would be directed at
WHO listeners who want to travel to new places, not to listeners in the
Maritimes (where WHO can rarely be heard, even by DXers with excellent
equipment).

With reference to CFRX. They use a Harris 1kw transmitter and I
would guess that the electric cost would be about $100 a month. They
also have an active support group that handles QSL's.

It is nice that they get support. I had an SW license years ago and truned
it in as there was no way I could afford to keep it running.

"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

iboc SUCKS!!!! Everybody in U.S.fed govt SUCKS!!!! TOO!
cuhulin

"David Eduardo" wrote in message
et...
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.


Just as an aside, when I was 19 and living in Casper, WY, there was no local
station that I could stand to listen to for more than a few minutes at a
time. I worked for the local CATV company as an installer. Their trucks had
no radios in them, so I was stuck with bringing my own. What I could afford
was an old off brand 6 transistor pocket radio that I could leave on the
dashboard as I drove around. My station of choice as I went about my
workday? KOA. Loud and clear. Great daytime coverage, that.