February 10, 2015
Is radio ready to ditch the decades-old paper ratings diary for good? Nielsen and a small market committee within its Audio Advisory Council are exploring potential new ways to collect, measure and report radio usage in diary markets. The impetus is a growing belief among clients that diaries are no longer sufficient to measure today’s fragmented media marketplace. Meeting monthly by telephone since the Council’s fall meeting, Nielsen says the committee has provided "valuable insight" into how it can continue to improve the diary service. "Their candid comments, coupled with input we received from talking with our customers in recent months, is helping to shape the roadmap of how the service we offer in small and medium markets might evolve," a Nielsen spokesperson says in a statement. The company will share those plans with its Advisory Council, Policy Guidelines Committee and clients in the coming weeks but declined to comment further. Sources on the committee, which is led by Nielsen VP of product leadership Brad Feldhaus, tell Inside Radio it is discussing several options. Among ideas that have been floated: supplementing the diary with telephone retrieval or online samples; merging it with other Nielsen local market measurement techniques; developing a more economical version of PPM; putting measurement software in cellphones; using different techniques for different-sized markets; and measuring fewer days per week and filling in the rest of the week with modeled data. The hope is that the world’s largest, most sophisticated measurement company can come up with something more reliable than a paper diary and a No. 2 pencil.
Dissatisfaction with the diary service is costing Nielsen clients. A growing number of broadcasters have cut the cord with diary measurement. Redwood Empire Stereocasters, a 35-year Arbitron/Nielsen subscriber, is the latest not to renew. It joins Galaxy Communications, Davidson Media and Birach Broadcasting in operating without ratings, along with Salem Communications and Saga Communications in some markets. Redwood VP/GM Tom Skinner says he doesn’t believe the diary service offers reliable ratings and that he could no longer justify its rising costs, due to lower transactional dollars in Santa Rosa, CA, where Redwood owns four stations. "The diary is old technology that I’m no longer willing to invest in," says Skinner, who served for 12 years on the Arbitron Advisory Council, including two terms as chairman. "In a way, Nielsen showed us the weakness in their own diary by inventing the PPM." Adelante Media Group CEO Jay Myers adds, "It’s been made worse by the fact that the currency among most advertisers has been the PPM and that has hurt diary markets." Gerry Boehme, a former 34-year Katz Media Group executive with a research background, says relying on recall-based ratings methodology "poorly positions smaller market radio against all competitors, including PPM-measured radio." Boehme, who served on the Arbitron Advisory Council for more than 20 years and operates GB Consulting, contends the diary meets none of the objectives measurement systems are designed to address: Provide reliable measurement at a reasonable cost, gain acceptance among buyers and sellers, demonstrate high ROI and maximize profitability for the ratings supplier. "The marketplace is rapidly changing and radio needs to keep pace," Boehme says.
New digital ad units may help radio sell display ads. Radio stations received 45% of their digital revenue through the sale of banner ads in 2013, twice what was billed from streaming audio ads, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau. With display continuing to dominate many stations’ digital sales, new research on the latest ad units may help make that inventory easier to sell to clients. Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) research focused on the so-called "rising star" display ads including such units as pushdowns, filmstrips and sidekicks which have more interactivity and engagement with consumers. The IAB says its study shows they’re helping brands get noticed more than with traditional display ads. The data shows the new ads have 30% stronger brand recall with just one exposure, rising to 42% when the consumer actually has some interaction with the ad. Consumers were also three-times as likely to interact with the ad — 34% versus 11% who interacted with the old-style banner ads. That’s probably due to the fact that the typical person stared at the more entertaining banner ads five-times as long. And while they’re also, on average, larger than old fashioned banner ads, the research shows consumers found them less annoying. "We knew that better creative canvasses have visual and emotional appeal, and garner interaction," IAB top researcher Sherrill Mane says. "The big challenge has been to demonstrate that aesthetic breakthroughs contribute to brand equity and our rigorous and comprehensive study substantiates that." Peter Minnium, who heads brand initiatives for the IAB, says the study confirms what was instinctively known all along: consumers pay more attention to the new display ads.
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