I believe in cume estimates and if you’re programming or talent, you should, too. Perhaps someone, somewhere, has been bonused on cume, but yeah, if you have a bonus plan, cume probably isn’t part of it. And I can hear the DOS or GSM saying “I don’t/can’t sell cume.”
Nonetheless, you ignore cume at your own peril, so read on and try to understand my reasons for why cume deserves far more attention than it gets.
When investment professionals make decisions about investments, they consider where the economy is going. In other words, they look for leading indicators. Cume is a leading indicator of where your station, show, or network is headed.
Cume (or cumulative audience) is the number of different people who tuned in for a specified amount of time. In radio, it’s one-quarter hour in the daypart, which can be just five minutes, and in a later column, I’ll explain why five minutes may not be five minutes. Average quarter hour (AQH) estimates are driven by longer listening from a much smaller number of individuals, or more specifically, the panelists or diary keepers who represent that group of individuals.
Think of cume as people sampling your content. They know who you are and maybe they don’t spend as much time with your station or show as you’d like, but they’re still showing up. In an era when there is precious little — if any — money for promotion, you’re talking to these people. It costs nothing to tell them on your air and/or stream about how wonderful your station or content is and do your best to convince them that listening longer is worth their valuable time.
Track the cume in your key demos as much as you can. I’ve seen too many instances when a station’s cume has been falling while the AQH held steady or even grew. The GM, the OM, and the PD were all happy and the talent was oblivious, as always.
However, the “Spidey sense” said that the station was heading for a fall because fewer people were tuning in. Most of the time, I was right. In those cases, the recommendation was to look for ways to increase sampling and create some short-term buzz.
Another reason is that cume is a more solid measure from a survey standpoint because it’s simply far less volatile, especially in the PPM world. How many program directors are geniuses one month and failures the next because one household that loved your station left the panel? Or perhaps a family went on vacation for a week and didn’t listen. Doesn’t matter why, but in the world of cume, everyone is equal.
The strongest P1 panelist or diary keeper is no better than that one quarter-hour per week participant which means a much smoother trend than you’ll generally see with AQH. Cume measures also hold up better when you “slice and dice” the data. PPM samples are far too small (we’ll save that discussion for a future column) and we all have a tendency to tear them apart because, as someone once said, 6+ is a family reunion and not a worthwhile measure except for bragging rights.
If you’re going to tear into the data, and you should, track the cume in the tight age spreads that are the subdivisions of your key demo and take the AQH estimates with a grain of salt. The same goes for diary markets with respect to tracking cume.
In PPM markets, you have a lot of flexibility to track the estimates, especially if you use the PPM Analysis Tool (AT). It’s not the friendliest piece of software you’ll ever run across, but you can do just about anything with it. During my time at Cumulus, I’d arrange training sessions for interested PDs on how to use AT. At one point, Nielsen Audio put together a set of short lessons to teach the tricks of the software. Learn it, use it, and you’ll thank me later. I used it extensively and it was often instrumental in either coaxing a PD off the ledge or in some cases, prompting one to find out whether the windows on the building’s upper floors were locked.
I believe in cume to the extent that long ago, I owned an English Springer Spaniel named Cume. You can see Cume here in a piece I wrote for Arbitron around 2000. While your success may be determined by AQH, take some time and check the cume.
