"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.

"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

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

Since FMs seldom get any coverage outside their own metro are, let alone
ratings, the point is moot.

Only when there are two metros that touch each other and are very close do
you see this at all, and most is A, not FM.

A good example is the Miami FMs... (whatever city in the MSA they "belong
to") where most have a tiny share of listening in West Palm Beach, a
separate market per Arbitron. The shares are so small they are unmarketable
at any price, since they do not represent very many people and are all to
the southern side of the market.

Similarly, the Riverside / San Berdoo market gets coverage by some LA
stations part way into the market geography. Since the IE is a shadow market
and has relatively few stations, a number of the bigger LA FMs show up, as
do a couple of AMS (only two or three LA AMs are listenable there) as the IE
is on the "backside" of the mountain where many of the biggest LA FMs are
grandfathered with superpower (some as much as 100 kw at 5,000 feet AMSL). A
real exception.

This is why there are less than 400 stations in the whole USA that have
ratings outside their home market. There are only about 25 cases where a
station has ratings that are above "half way up the ranker" anywhere in the
USA. So, we are discussing only a handful, at best, of stations that have
competitive listening levels outside the home market.


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.

Nationally, about 40% of Americans use AM, and about 85% use FM. In some
markets, AM usage is higher, and in others, lower. An example of high AM
usage is San Francisco, where only 3 stations fully cover the metro, all AM,
and no FM does due to terrain. On the other hand, in Washington, DC, AM
usage is much lower due to the horrible signals in the market... even the
all news station is on FM there.

AMs that are successful are either in the news/talk/sports arena, or in the
ethnic/religion/specialty arena. To be one of the first, you must have a
monster signal. To be one of the others, you must be gospel, teaching &
preaching, in a language like Russian, Korean or Kreyol (generally not
Spanish) or be a brand extension, like Radio Disney.

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

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

Picky. No Denver FM has a city grade signal (70 dbu) that gets south of
Larkspur. None has a 60 dbu that gets more than 2 to 3 miles to the north of
Monument. None even has a 54 (protected) contour that gets to Colorado
Springs. Just like I can occasionally DX on inversions San Diego FM stations
in Burbank or get a couple of Phoenix stations on FM in Prescott, there are
no Denver FMs that get anywhere close to NM except on rare and occasional
skip... in fact, all the Denver frequencies are duplicated with closer
operations than Denver at nearly any frequency. At minimum they have
powerful adjacents very close by.

You do know that the ideal AM site is in salt water, right? Lacking that,
it
is in the lowest, flattest, wettest, most organic 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.

And FM covers identically day and night, while most AMs have vastly reduced
night coverage.

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

All radio ratings measure all listening, including satellite and internet
streams. Were any distant signals to have any significance, they would show
in the ratings. They do not. The fact is, FM has more listeners in the
average market and has since FM passed AM in listening share in 1978. At
present, the shares are around 80% FM and 20% AM nationally, with
exceptions, all dependent on how good local signals are in the local market.

Again, the reason is that FM covers today's sprawling metros better than
99.5% of AMs (meaning all but maybe 30 AMs in metros do not cover their
market day and night well enough to be pleasant listening). Due to quality,
AMs have gone to talk, but due to coverage, most have been pushed to the
bottom of the stack.

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.

It was a novelty flavor. These are like the green shakes at McDonalds, done
for a while for novelty and brief sales, and then discontinued. Selling
sodas in disposable rather than reusable bottles has made this viable and it
is done all the time.

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 "listener
or tow [sic]" is probably more like 10 here, 20 here, 5 there, adding
up to the hundreds to thousands.

First, there are only a few stations that even get, consistently, outside
their own markets. And we are talking about maybe a few thousand listeners
outside the normal groundwave coverage for AM and none for FM. Let's take
KFI in LA for a moment... an AM on the best 1-A channel in the USA. If it
gets total listening at night of 200,000 persons in the LA market, and picks
up another 5,000 on skywave listening outside the groundwave coverage, that
is not enough to be significant. It is less than 2% increase, which is
smaller than the margin of error of the whole survey.

Advertisers buy by the market, so that will not change. Advertisers do not
buy stations that are not in the top few in the demographic they are looking
for, so the minor stations will not get bought anyway (that is why they are
ethnic, religious or whatever anyhow).

I gave you a list of stations that have the potential to get a signal
reliably into areas outside their local groundwave coverage. You can add a
few I-B stations like KWKH, KFBK, KGO, WMVP, etc to the list of ones that do
get some, directional, skywave coverage, but after a handful of those, there
are NO stations in the US capable of getting skywave without frequent
interference, etc, to many listeners. The number of stations is so small,
and the listening levels so low that no advertiser is going to look at this
as anything except a tiny bonus to their existing buy providing the station
is even on the buy due tolocal ratings.

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

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.

The CKLW ratings were, for a while, good in Cleveland because the CHR
stations there were on 1420 and 1260, both horrible AMs in suburban
coverage, both to the east (neither night covers well even to Lyndhurst) and
to the West as well. And in the time CKLW was a factor, FM was not. As soon
as the FCC forced FM to develop, CKLW died in Cleveland, Sandusky, Toledo,
etc.

CKLW was not "Detroit / Windsor" It was a Windsor station always, and used
"The Motor City" as a euphemistic ID point.

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 threshold is intended to make the results reliable statistically. One or
two mentions could be form someone who vacationed a day or two out of town.
Arbitron looks for a pattern of consistent, measurable listening within the
market. If you add up the "outside groundwave" mentions you get nothing. I
just did for KFI in PHX and Las Vegas and came up with two diaries in
Phoenix and none in Las Vegas. Since each diary is representing
approximately 1000 persons, that means that there are maybe a couple of
thousand people who listened to KFI in the most populated areas that are
skywave accessible... compared to way over a million total listeners in the
market.

This is just not enough for any advertiser to care about. It does not give
measurable impact outside the market, and goes nowhere in satisfying the
needs in the other two markets.

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.

And nearly every East Overshoe has local stations. Since advertisers seldom
buy ads on AM at night, and radio at night itself is not much used by
advertisers, there is no gain for advertisers to use speculative,
unsubstantiated data when they usually by with very complex reach and
frequency matrix based systems that determine buys on cost per point in the
target demo. Agencies are not going to rewrite their buying software
toaccomodate a few listeners to a few 1 A AMs that get a couple of
occasional skywave listeners.

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.

The metrics for ad buys are based on real listening in the home market. the
software makes no compensation for out of market coverage. This is just not
going to happen, and introducing a fluctuating variable hurts radio overall
as it makes people doubt the medium. Radio is bought by market at the
station level. Even network or syndicated radio is bought by the total of
the individual markets, even in RADAR (an Arbitron network product).


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 either 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.

There is no filtering. The diary mentions are there to see. I just looked at
them for two markets. the fact is, there are practically none of this type
of listening mentions.

The only "material change" that your advertisers care
about is someone who makes a sale. The guy who owns a Porsche 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 Porsche
dealer advertising there might get his interest piqued.

The guy with the Porsche in Needles already knows where to take it. Most
radio advertising is for goods and services that are available in every
market of any size in the US. We are talking Wal-Mart, Bed Bath and Beyond,
Exxon stations, Heinz catsup, coke and Pepsi, Allstate agents, Ford dealers.
People who live in Needles who shop rodeo Drive already know where it is. We
are talking mass market, and the only way to reach most consumers via radio
is by local stations.

And, in most places in the Southwest, Mexican station interference has
made
the usefulness 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, targeting
the American audience, had to contend with PJB being a flamethrower on
that same frequency ALSO targeting an American audience.

Actually, TWR on 800 was directional at South America at night. In fact,
form 10 PM to 4 AM EST it was in Portuguese for Brazil. It did not aim at
the USA at all. I have been there and owned a station on 805 in Ecuador that
got hit every night by the directional beam of TWR.

Usually
CKLW won out in the northern states, but I recall one evening of freak
atmospherics where CKLW was overwhelmed by PJB in Cleveland.

I remember a 10 kw Venezuelan overriding WKYC on 1100 in Shaker Heights one
night. Atmospherics do this on occasion. It is not normal.

And CKLW when it had ratings was in an era when AM was bought differently
and when AM was dominant to the extent of being about 95% of all listening.

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.

No, you will never see it. But the fat that there are 40 or so companies
doing radio research for stations should indicate they know a lot about
their listeners.

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.

I have no idea what they were surveying, but it could have been anything. If
they want a service satisfaction survey, they will do it. If they want to
ask about interest in a new service, they will not ask about existing ones
or about satisfaction.


LA ad rates on major stations are in the $1000 to $2000 per spot range.
In
Riverside / San Bernardino, the Inland Empire separate market, the local
stations 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 station
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 Bernardino 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.)

Again, advertisers with an interest outside of the local market buy
advertising in the other markets they care about locally. They do not use
shadow stations to do this, as that is hit and miss, especially on
geography. It is just the way buyers do business, and radio can not change
this. Since it benefits so few stations, there is no incentive.

For a while, we subscribed to the IE ratings, and tried to use the add on
bonus numbers to sell with to make our stations more attractive. No way. All
we got was a couple of hundred thousand in extra cost for the book, and no
added sales. "We do not buy Riverside as part of LA for Radio... we buy it
separately." It was not even good as a tie breaker to get an edge on a
station with less than our Riverside delivery.

Since advertisers do not care, and can not be persuaded and there are so few
affected markets and stations, this is a non-issue. Even if it made sense,
thousands of advertisers and agencies are not going to change just to pick
up a few extra listeners from a handful of stations. There is no incentive.

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.

Actually, NPR ratings are downtrending. And most listeners have no idea of
what Clear Channel is... they either like or dislike a specific station.

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.

We did not have them to begin with on 13,300 of the US radio stations. Those
that do do not care, so there is no loss.

"David Eduardo" wrote:


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

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

Picky.

Absolutely. All generalizations are false, including this one. Those
listeners along I-25 are transients traveling to and from cities like
Denver. Pueblo does diddly along there, but Denver booms in.

No Denver FM has a city grade signal (70 dbu) that gets south of
Larkspur.

70dBu is a pretty serious signal. While that might be the ideal, you
might find that even today's receivers can do well with less.

None has a 60 dbu that gets more than 2 to 3 miles to the north of
Monument. None even has a 54 (protected) contour that gets to Colorado
Springs.

Monument Hill casts a great big shadow over the Springs, but you
continue south for another 50 miles and there's Denver again.

Just like I can occasionally DX on inversions San Diego FM stations
in Burbank or get a couple of Phoenix stations on FM in Prescott, there are
no Denver FMs that get anywhere close to NM except on rare and occasional
skip... in fact, all the Denver frequencies are duplicated with closer
operations than Denver at nearly any frequency. At minimum they have
powerful adjacents very close by.

My personal experience differs. But that's okay -- next time I'm down
that way, I'll just tell myself I'm hallucinating the entire time, or
that it's amazing that there's some tropo happening *every time I'm in
that area.*



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

First, there are only a few stations that even get, consistently, outside
their own markets.

By your filtered numbers. Which I simply do not accept as an accurate
reflection of reality. Use them all you want for your narrow view,
but I believe your methodology is *fundamentally* flawed.


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.

The CKLW ratings were, for a while, good in Cleveland because the CHR
stations there were on 1420 and 1260, both horrible AMs in suburban
coverage, both to the east (neither night covers well even to Lyndhurst) and
to the West as well. And in the time CKLW was a factor, FM was not. As soon
as the FCC forced FM to develop, CKLW died in Cleveland, Sandusky, Toledo,
etc.

CKLW was not "Detroit / Windsor" It was a Windsor station always, and used
"The Motor City" as a euphemistic ID point.

It was a Windsor station, but it always announced as Detroit /
Windsor. You may want to visit some of the many historical pages on
CKLW before you make any claims as to what it did when.

As for WHK and WIXY, they had their listeners. WHK targeted a
different market -- country -- and WIXY wasn't as polished as CKLW but
was vaguely similar in playlist-type. FM was certainly a factor at
that time -- mid 70s -- but the target audience of CKLW and WIXY
didn't have the money for FM receivers to get WMMS, WGCL, and WWWM.
(At that time, WCLV was transmitting in quadrophonic and WWWM used
Dolby FM. FM was a player, but for an entirely different level of
income.)


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 threshold is intended to make the results reliable statistically. One or
two mentions could be form someone who vacationed a day or two out of town.

No. Brenda Ann shared her experiences; I've described mine. Even you
talk about having to discourage on-air talent from acknowledging
someone from out of *your* definition of the market.

Arbitron looks for a pattern of consistent, measurable listening within the
market. If you add up the "outside groundwave" mentions you get nothing.

"We've adjusted the model to not show any listeners in low-density
regions, and now it tells us definitively that no one is there,
anyway." Nice.


And nearly every East Overshoe has local stations.

Sure. This East Overshoe has one station that broadcasts the local
church services; that one broadcasts the farm report info; the other
is run as a labor of love.

But they have no useful information. The East Overshoe *I* live in
has no local stations. None. Nada. The previous owners of my house,
non-techies by any measure, had some substantial FM antennas on the
house to get their stations. The neighbors do, too.


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.

The metrics for ad buys are based on real listening in the home market. the
software makes no compensation for out of market coverage.

You can argue in a circle for hours, but you'll still be where you
started. "The market is defined as *here*, and any sales outside of
it don't count. We count 0 sales out of our defined market, so
there's no out-of-market sales."

This is just not
going to happen, and introducing a fluctuating variable hurts radio overall
as it makes people doubt the medium.

I'm sure that AM radio is truly mysterious and frightening technology
to your advertisers. At least, it is after *you* are done with
them...

Perhaps -- that's a believable explanation. However, CKLW, targeting
the American audience, had to contend with PJB being a flamethrower on
that same frequency ALSO targeting an American audience.

Actually, TWR on 800 was directional at South America at night. In fact,
form 10 PM to 4 AM EST it was in Portuguese for Brazil. It did not aim at
the USA at all. I have been there and owned a station on 805 in Ecuador that
got hit every night by the directional beam of TWR.

Usually
CKLW won out in the northern states, but I recall one evening of freak
atmospherics where CKLW was overwhelmed by PJB in Cleveland.

I remember a 10 kw Venezuelan overriding WKYC on 1100 in Shaker Heights one
night. Atmospherics do this on occasion. It is not normal.

Of course not. That was my point. CKLW's target was the northern
U.S. They covered it, well and consistently.

WABC seemed to have an antenna pattern change that put their coverage
west and south for evening/night broadcasting. They were as reliable
as sunrise.


And CKLW when it had ratings was in an era when AM was bought differently

....and the "new, improved" method you espouse is soo much better,
right?


I have no idea what they were surveying, but it could have been anything. If
they want a service satisfaction survey, they will do it. If they want to
ask about interest in a new service, they will not ask about existing ones
or about satisfaction.

IIRC, it was after Qwest bought US-west and found out that they
inherited all the record fines and customer dissatisfaction. I don't
know for sure. But the questions were irrelevent, truly. I took the
survey and laughed about it for a long time.


(sigh) here we go again. You don't sell ads to a local Riverside /
San Bernardino 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.)

Again, advertisers with an interest outside of the local market buy
advertising in the other markets they care about locally. They do not use
shadow stations to do this, as that is hit and miss, especially on
geography. It is just the way buyers do business, and radio can not change
this. Since it benefits so few stations, there is no incentive.

So J&R got where they are by advertising in every market across the
country, right?


For a while, we subscribed to the IE ratings, and tried to use the add on
bonus numbers to sell with to make our stations more attractive. No way. All
we got was a couple of hundred thousand in extra cost for the book, and no
added sales. "We do not buy Riverside as part of LA for Radio... we buy it
separately." It was not even good as a tie breaker to get an edge on a
station with less than our Riverside delivery.

In other words, the radio industry has trained its regular advertisers
well, so you're not only thinking inside the box, you managed to nail
it shut from the inside. Congrats.


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.

Actually, NPR ratings are downtrending. And most listeners have no idea of
what Clear Channel is... they either like or dislike a specific station.

Over what time interval? three weeks? three months? one year?
three years?


--
Eric F. Richards

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

"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.

"Brenda Ann" wrote:


"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.



Doesn't matter -- David says you don't exist. :-)

--
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
...
"Brenda Ann" wrote:


"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.



Doesn't matter -- David says you don't exist. :-)

That is not skywave coverage, as Brenda Ann mentioned. Today, with computer
noise, ignition noise, dimmers, and all manner of other items, the daytime
coverage that was useful in the 60's is significantly reduced by RFI.

"Eric F. Richards" wrote in message
...
"Brenda Ann" wrote:


"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.



Doesn't matter -- David says you don't exist. :-)

Oh, in 1964 Casper had 3 AM stations, two of which were class IV's and one
was a daytimer. Today, it has 4 AMs, one a 50 kw station, and 11 FMs, 6 of
which are 100,000 watters. There is relatively no need for listening to
distant signals, especially since the 50 kw station carries most of the same
programs as KOA in Denver.