It may be Portugal’s second-best export because it’s hard to beat really good Port wine (I’m partial to Taylor Fladgate 20 year old). What is it? The PPM Analysis Tool (AT), of course, which was developed by Markdata, a Portuguese IT company. It’s not the easiest piece of software to use, but when it comes to tearing apart PPM data, nothing beats it.
Until the Control Panel Report (CPR) came along, AT was the only way to really dig into how the sample played out and where your station was getting the best part of its audience. Even with the CPR and PD Advantage (if you have it), AT is usually the best way to find out what really happened.
What can you do with AT? Some examples:
- Exact ages (you can look at any specific age from 6 to 99)
- Individual days of the measurement month
- Individual counties and discrete zip codes
- Individual quarter hours
- The number of meters listening to your station in any quarter hour during the month
- In some cases, you can find specific meters in specific zip codes with the amount of AQH they generated
The downside is that it’s not always easy and can involve jumping through some hoops to get to the information.
When I used to use AT at Cumulus to determine specific zip codes for marketing, I could find the best zip codes for our stations and direct competitors, but swapping zip codes to get at the information could take quite a while. There are a lot of zip codes in the New York and Los Angeles metros.
Let me relate a fun story from my Cumulus time. Much as many of you who use PPM hate this, Nielsen releases the December monthly during the last week of the year when just about everyone is on vacation or would like to be on vacation. The reason for this timetable goes back to the Arbitron days and as with many things, it relates to money. Arbitron could not recognize revenue until data was delivered (I assume Nielsen’s finances operate the same way). In order to make the year look better, PPM data was released before the end of the calendar year as Arbitron used the calendar year for financials. That’s why you get December monthlies between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
In 2018, I happened to spend time with the first December release the day it came out. I worked from home, so it wasn’t a big deal to review it. Looking at the day-by-day data, something fishy showed up. There was one day where radio listening in New York was down to almost nothing. Can you imagine WLTW with no AQH for a day? The only way that happens is if New York is obliterated and because that hadn’t been in the news, it had to be an issue with Nielsen. Checked Los Angeles. Same problem on the same day of the month.
I got on the phone and started calling lots of people at Nielsen, almost all of whom were on vacation as well. I finally found one old friend, Danny Monistere, who I have known for years from when we worked together at Birch/Scarborough. Danny was working that day because he was planning to take vacation in January. When the issue was investigated, it turned out that every PPM market was missing the same day and all of the PPM markets had to be rerun. Not all were reissued as some were not out yet and could be fixed before release, but the result was 24 reissues.
If I hadn’t run day-by-day, I wouldn’t have known. Gary Heller from Audacy also found the issue a few hours after I did (perhaps a time zone thing as Gary lives in the Los Angeles area). If you’re wondering, you don’t get a bounty for finding something like that, but other research people may be envious. I know, it’s a strange business.
How do you run day-by-day in AT? Go to the Trend option in Analysis Tool and when you choose the survey, click on the dropdown box next to the survey month and select “day”.
You’ll get each individual day for the month or week that you’re running. Keep in mind that if you run a daypart that doesn’t include the whole week, the days that are not part of the daypart will show zeros (for example, Saturdays and Sundays will show zeros if you pick a Monday-Friday daypart).
One other angle to this run is to look at the PUR for each day. PUR is Persons Using Radio. In PPM, it’s referred to as PUMM or Persons Using Measured Media. I don’t use the term PUMM because of the grammatical error.
The word “media” is plural. The singular is “medium”. Last I knew, Nielsen Audio measured just one medium: radio. By the way, the diary service still calls it PUR. Nonetheless, you can look at each day’s radio usage or run averages and find out where there is more audience available. Save your good stuff for when there are more listeners.
There’s a lot more to AT. Try it and you’ll find out more about your ratings than you ever expected.
Let’s meet again next week.
