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


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

We are looking for listening in our home market. I am with a station
that
is
#1 in LA, and is top 5 in Riverside. Riverside is a separate market,
and
we
do not make a cent off it.

I'm sure that if you cared to track it, you would find that you made
quite a bit of money there. But you don't because your model tells
you that the world ends at the edge of LA.

We make no money and never have. The Inland Empire is bought as a
separate
market.

I'm sure that your advertisers, if they measure where their customers
come from, would find that the world doesn't end at LA.

Most advertisers we have advertise on a plethora of media, so they can not
tell which specific entity in which specific medium does what. Further, they
don't care as they have metrics for evaluating the reach of a campaign.

By the way, we have had at least 2 staitons in the top 3 25-54 (the sales
demo) in LA for the last 11 years, and currently have three of the top
5.
We get no money from fringe markets, never have, never will.

Sure, if you don't sell to advertisers who ignore their customer base
outside of LA.

The fact that you are being obstinate shows you are unfamiliar with how
media sales are conducted. If you knew, you would know that the medium
(radi) and the station have no influence on buying patterns at all but the
smallest advertisers. And those small advertisers can not afford a top LA
station.

Again, if a regional or naitonal account wants to buy a market outside LA,
they buy the stations that are home to the local market, as the "from affar"
stations can not not do the merchandising, promotion, remotes and things
that are part of many if not most radio buys.

All those ignorant yokels out in the boonies, though,
they might want to buy things too, and if those ignorant yokels happen
to have quite a bit of money, they might want the finer things that LA
can offer but the local stores don't.

But ad buyers reach them through local media. Since it takes hours to drive
from central Riverside county to central LA County, and anyting available in
one is available in the other, it is unlikely anyone drives 120 miles to
shop in LA... or in Riverside.

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.

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.

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.

In any case, we are discussing distant MW reception, and the main reason
the
Hallicrafters and Hammarlunds and Drakes and Galaxys of the US left the
market is that there is low demand... partly because there is limited
interest in distant MW reception compared with the 50's and 60's.

Disagree. I think in fact your view is utterly inaccurate. The
market for inexpensive MW reception will go on until you kill it, and
you appear to be working very hard at it.

The market in discussion is DX skywave reception of MW, which is so small as
to be unmeasurable by Arbitron. Since skywave only occurs at night, and
raido listening is very light at night and seldom bought by advertisers,
there is a decline in interest in programming to this daypart by staitons
and near zero interest by clients. If big numbers of listeners (relatively
speaking) int he metros are not bought at night, tiny numbers in Numb Pluck,
AR, are of no interest except to PI accounts... and many stations do not
take PI.

In any case, the stations with decent night coverage do so well in thier
local metros they do not care about distant listeners.

Local AM is very alive on staitons that have the few good-enough signals
that cover the entire metro. In fact, one of ours, a 50 kw station in Miami,
is typically in the top 5 in that market and has been for over a decade.
This is because it gives local service to the Miami community it targets and
does not worry about Key West or Palm Beach or Naples or Yeehaw Junction,
all of which it covers (but gets no listeners in).

The biggest fact you are ignoring, among many, is that radio listening in
daytime is on average about 22% of all people at any given time. In
evenings, after 7 PM, it drops by 11 PM to about 2%. Advertisers
specifically exclude nights and overnights from ad buys. So out of market
coverage is irrelevant. Most Ams do not have any our of market coverage,
as
they are daytimers or directional or lower powered and on congested
channels.

After 11 PM, yes, to 2%. What's your 7-9 PM numbers?

Radio listening declines from about 11% in 7 PM to 8 to 2% from 11 to
Midnight. And since these are the hours advertisers mostly buy on TV, they
do NOT buy radio in the same daypart.

Yet you still manage to sell ads at night. I've never heard a station
that went consistently commercial-free from 11 PM to 6 AM.

Most of what you hear are bonus spots, rotators and ROS buys. There are
sledom any night-specific buys. Sometimes a station that is enormously
strong in mornings can force advertisers to buy 1 AM to Midnight to be
"allowed" to get on 6 to 10 AM, but nights are pretty much a wash.


The few AMs that do have fairly borad night signals do not get listening
in
enough quantity out of market to make anything of.

Again, if you don't sell to advertisers who can 1) utilize that market
and 2) measure it, I think you'd find differently.

There are no such advertisers. Any advertiser that buys multiple markets has
an agency, and they buy by market and do not have the time to worry about 11
skywave listeners 500 miles away.

The LA staiton I referred to has over 1.2 million weekly listeners in the LA
market. Nothing it could get in fringe markets would enghance significantly
the reach, and advertisers buying LA would not stand for rates based on out
of market coverage, not to mention that this would blow the equal-geography
standard for metrics they use.

But, you'll never know if Arbitron throws away any numbers that don't
fit the market.

Arbitron does not throw away anything. If an out of market station gets the
minimum amount of reporting to make the book, they are in it. Same as a
local station. No different standards. What happens is that, except for
peripheral markets, staitons do not make the book based on a) night
listening alone and b) skywave.

Hell, even the local NPR outlet knows better, based
in Greeley, CO and pitching themselves from Wyoming to Denver. I
wonder what their pledge numbers look like -- they certainly don't
throw away pledges from outside of their coverage area. (As an
aside, I wonder what Arbitron does with their numbers?)

Pledges do not come through ad agencies and client marketing departments.
NPR can beg wherever they want. Commercial radio has to adjust to the
reality of how advertisers want to buy us.

Advertisers do not buy at
night,

None? Never? I'll just ignore the ads I hear at night, then.

Freebies, PI, bonus spots, forced ROS buys, rotators. Nights and overnights
hardly contriute to station revenue.

and stations generally have no ratings outside of the groundwave
area.

Hmmm. I'll have to go read up on the Minn. Twins debacle to see about
that. It was covered in this thread... someone went by the numbers
(and the dollars they believed they had) and killed off their market.

That makes no sense. Again... AMs do not get ratings outside the groundwave
coverage area, so they do not sell outside that area. In fact, most metro
area AMs only get ratings inside the 10 mv/m contour (due to nooise levels
in modern cities) so all tha tcounts is the primar daytime groundwave
signal.

Fine. Ignore your real customers. Insult them even and tell them
they don't exist. It's *your* career path, not mine. Enjoy the ride
all the way into the ground.

My ride is just fine, based on localism. Having 3 of the top 5 in the
largest ad market in America is hardly riding into the ground. And we are
doing fine in our other 16 markets, too, with the same model. And we have
a
number of 50 kw AMs. They serve the local community, well, and only.

There are really only a couple reasons to listen to AM radio today.
1) low cost of receivers. 2) long-range reception for whatever
reason that listener may have. 3) talk radio -- AM is never going to
challenge FM on fidelity, IBOC or not. I wonder how many classical
and jazz AMs there are out there? That's an answer I'd trust you to
have.

And the successful staitons today on AM are local, do talk or news or sports
if they are in the first tier. The other group of enormously successful AMs
do religion, gospel, and much ethnic programming. The Farsi staiton in LA is
enormously profitable, as are several Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese
langauge staitons.

Since most markets only have a few full coverage AMs that blanket the
market, just a couple of talkers and a sports station usually fills up the
good facilities.

But I think your ride is going into the ground. In fact, this thread
has depressed me into thinking that XM and/or Sirius may just succeed,
because they aren't foolish enough to accept an arbitrary boundary on
their footprint. (okay, national boundaries, but things get really
complicated on that one.) Their coverage area is the continental U.S.
and they'll go ahead and sell their ads to anyone willing to put them
on the air. (Commercial free? ha. I doubt one channel of the
satellite services will be commercial free in 10 years.)

Most satellite channels have no ads, and ads wil be at best a couple of
percent of revenues. Satellite sells a service to the listener. radio sells
advertising to advertisers. We do what advertisers want, not what you think
is a good model in another business. Sorry, wrong argument.

It would be very, very interesting to see the raw, unmassaged data
that Arbitron (and the other one)

There is no "other" one.

collect and see what happens when
they start putting together demographics and quantity (but NOT
geography) of all the out-of-market listeners.

Any subscriber has this data on thier desktop. I looked at 17 markets, from
NY to Mc Allen and can not find any skywave listening being recorded. There
are a lot of below the minimum mentions, but to stations on the fringes of
the markets or to very poor performing locals. But no AM night skywave.

FYI, Arbitron is audited every year by a committe of experts called the MRC
which reporesents advertisers and agencies. The methodology treats all
staitons equally... if Radio Moscow appeared in a minimum number of diaries,
it would be ranked int he ratings along with all the other qualifying
stations.

Obviously that's
closely held, but probably someone like you or Peter could have seen
it in some job somewhere along the line.

Every subscriber can see every station that had atleast one diary mention in
every book. There is nothing closely held about this data. It just does not
contain anything that contributes to your argument... quite the contrary, it
blows it out of the water.