Among the other things I do in my semi-retirement is hold membership on the National Association of Broadcasters Committee on Local Radio Audience Measurement, better known, if at all, by its acronym of COLRAM. Over the years, I’ve been involved with COLRAM as an NAB staffer, a member (two times), the chair, and presented to the group countless times while working for rating services. One of the rules for COLRAM members is a twist on the old Las Vegas slogan, “What is shown to COLRAM stays in COLRAM.” This “cone of silence” allows Nielsen and other companies to talk about their plans, get feedback from members representing the pantheon of radio companies, and not read anything about the discussion in the trade press.
In late July, Nielsen made a presentation to COLRAM about a potential change in how quarter hours are credited for PPM. It’s major. I’ve not written about it to date because the presentation was confidential. However, the whole industry appears to know about it and Jason Barrett mentioned the change in his closing comments at the Barrett News Summit in DC earlier this month. If Nielsen is sharing, then let’s talk about it.
The planned change is this: Instead of five minutes in a clock quarter hour earns the QH, the new rule would be three minutes for PPM markets. Nielsen has shared some preliminary data and they’re doing more analyses now. You don’t need a Ph.D. to figure out that AQH and cume will increase, which is certainly good news.
Radio listening levels (Persons Using Radio; PUMM is a useless acronym) have been decreasing for a long time. The last boost to levels came in the mid-2010s when stations discovered that the Voltair unit could improve their ratings. For a couple of years, PURs improved as stations installed Voltair in their chains. Once everyone had Voltair, the levels started their downward march again. This change is a way that Nielsen can “goose” the numbers…for a year.
There is a precedent for a “three-minute rule”. While no one at Nielsen knew it, some of us who have been around for a while remembered that the network radio service, RADAR, recently put out to pasture by Nielsen, used a three-minute rule prior to the purchase of the service by Arbitron in 2001. RADAR, when owned by Statistical Research Inc. (SRI), collected their own listening data by phone and used “three minutes gets you the quarter hour”. After Arbitron bought the service, the results were based on diaries (PPM was incorporated later using the five-minute rule. A three-minute rule is not new, but rather an obscure bit of radio ratings history. SRI was run by the late Gale Metzger, considered by many to be “the pope” of audience measurement. If Gale thought three minutes was acceptable, that’s a good start.
So far, so good. AQH ratings go up, cumes, already very high in PPM, will go up, too. There will be some differences by demo, race/ethnic, and format, but we’ll leave those analyses to Nielsen.
What will it mean to programmers? Since PPM was rolled out, programmers have typically used “bow tie” stop sets, around :12 and :42 after the hour. With multiple stations in a cluster and some with overlapping audiences, other stations may have stop sets at different times. I advocate either :06 and :36 or :21 and :51 because having six minutes into the next quarter hour would give QH credit. The extra minute accounts for jocks starting the break early or a condition known as “clock drift” where a panelist’s meter is slightly out of sync with the station’s encoder, in other words, an insurance policy.
In my opinion, a three-minute rule shouldn’t change where you place your stopsets although my preferred option might be two minutes earlier. The initial Nielsen data showed a surprising number of short listening sessions, so making major changes in reaction to the change will probably not be productive. Better programming minds than mine may have other thoughts.
Programmers in PPM markets have been dealing with the concept of short listening sessions for over a decade. While I’ve written about how I disagree that the average listening session is nine or ten minutes (turning down the audio for more than a minute starts a new session) but is perhaps as long as a half hour, keeping things short and sweet and driving forward momentum should not change.
I’m looking forward to seeing the next analyses that Nielsen will present. We’ll see more markets, more demos including race/ethnic, and more dayparts. One question in my mind is if cumes for broad dayparts go up by any significant percentage, does that imply that we have a lot of radio listeners who spend less than five minutes a week with radio? A scary thought.
Let’s meet again next week.
