There’s a lot of doom and gloom in the radio business these days and for the most part, there is good reason for it. Whether you use the term “layoff” or “RIF” or “on the beach”, good people have lost livelihoods. Listening levels have declined and even with the change in PPM from five minutes to three minutes to credit the quarter hour beginning early next year, the prognosis isn’t great.
Under the heading of “misery loves company”, it could be worse. Just look at cable. Or perhaps we aren’t supposed to use the word “cable” anymore per a quote in Cynopsis. Kathleen Finch, the outgoing Chairman and CEO of US Networks at Warner Bros. Discovery (she’s retiring) said during an interview in London that “we should stop limiting ourselves to calling ourselves cable execs that make cable content. That’s going away at some point so what we all are is creatives”. Who would have believed that “cable” could be verboten for cable people? Will Larry the Cable Guy become Larry the Creative Guy? Perhaps we should all become “creatives” although as a researcher, “creative research” generally refers to making it up.
Another trade publication, TV Newscheck, linked to a story in Policyband highlighting some Nielsen data compiled by the research firm MoffettNathanson. If you missed it, Comcast has bundled most of their cable networks into a separate company (temporarily called SpinCo) keeping only Bravo in the Comcast fold. Here’s the relevant chart:
If you’re not used to TV data, this is based on persons 18-49 (more prevalent in video than the P25-54 we typically use in radio) and covers the billions of minutes of viewing to the cable networks that are being spun off. Craig Moffett’s comment on the chart involved the use of the word “catastrophic”. Yes, the chart goes back to 2008, but as someone with a bit of experience with Nielsen data, I don’t think I could find ratings data that would show this kind of decline for any one company in our business.
Brad Adgate in Forbes noted that the high-water mark for cable penetration was in May 2011, when Nielsen said 90.7% of all US households subscribed. The most recent number was 55.3%, but “traditional cable” (not including “virtual cable” companies or vMPVDs) was below 40%. Combining 2022 and 2023, almost ten million US households cancelled their cable subscriptions. Per Nielsen’s latest Gauge report (October 2024), just 26.3% of all viewing time for persons 2+ was spent with cable. By contrast, streaming was up to 40.5%, broadcast was 24.0%, and “other” was 9.2%.
If cable networks have lousy national reach with the possible exception of live sports, what about streaming? Ad Age’s Jack Neff wrote an interesting article last week entitled “Why People See the Same Ads So Often-Behind the Ad Industry’s Murky Secret”. The article is behind a paywall, but if you can get to it, the story makes for some enlightening reading.
Like many of you, I watch a reasonable amount of streaming. As a hockey fan, watching an entire game on ESPN+ ensures GEICO, Progressive, and a few other advertisers that they’ll get about a ten frequency with me. That’s for one game. Another streamer had us targeted for ads for HIV treatments.
Let’s put this all together. If we take out live sports, cable network viewing is down drastically to the point that one cable executive, I mean creative executive, suggested that the word “cable” is toxic. Meanwhile, advertisers are paying for crazy frequencies when their ads run on ad-supported streaming platforms. Yet the advertising dollars keep flowing to these platforms when radio, despite our audience decline, offers a far better ad environment at lower cost.
To someone who has been around for a while, it seems like nothing ever changes. In my younger days, we complained about local ad dollars going heavily into newspapers when circulation was declining. Then it was the glitz of broadcast television while local cable was offering “TV at radio prices”. Now, streamers run ridiculous frequencies for advertisers which may turn consumers against them. I wish I had some brilliant idea to offer that would change things. Maybe you do…
Let’s meet again next week.
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