Last Wednesday, Garrett Searight wrote a piece in Barrett Media about broadcaster concerns regarding the Nielsen PPM sample in Los Angeles due to the fires. The radio people Garrett interviewed questioned whether the Los Angeles PPM sample will reflect “accurate” listening to LA radio stations due to a lack of compliance by some of the sample.
I’m using the Nielsen term “compliance” in a tongue-in-cheek way because when you’re packing an emergency kit and realizing that you may return to ashes and embers rather than your family home, bringing along PPM watches is probably not a priority.
Per CalFire, the Palisades fire started on January 7, during the last week of the Holiday survey period. You’ve likely noticed that the Holiday measurement period is five weeks this year as every so often, Nielsen must extend it by a week so that the monthlies somewhat reflect their names. The January survey started on the 9th and as the entire radio industry seems to be aware, that date is also the start of the three-minute quarter-hour rule.
I could speculate about the potential effect of the fires and evacuations on the estimates for Holiday Week 5, January Week 1, and beyond. But speculation is just that and not worth my time to write about it nor your time to read it. I’ve been through some of these events during my rating service tenures and the better option is to suggest ways that you can evaluate the results after Nielsen releases them.
First, I think it’s incumbent on Nielsen to do some work on their own. The company should put together an industry presentation with broad results on Los Angeles audio usage and a comprehensive release with specific information. Sure, not everyone will like what Nielsen will report, but do we have any other options?
While I’ve written about the competition in the video space in the past, no true competition exists for Nielsen Audio today or in the immediate future. If you don’t like Nielsen, you don’t have many other options.
Here’s what I would expect from a Nielsen presentation:
- Sample status by day and if households are out of the sample due to fires or evacuation, how many and where? How those homes will be replaced is not relevant now.
- How did radio/audio do? And please don’t use the bogus “news/talk” format category that combines commercial and non-commercial radio stations. For example, KNX is in the “all news” category while KFI is “news/talk/information”. KPCC/LAist (public radio) is also “news/talk/information”, but KBLA is “talk/personality”. I don’t have specific information, but no doubt many music stations veered away from their standard formats as well.
- Was more radio consumed at home than the norm? PPM is also used for out-of-home measurement for local television. Since radio is paying the bill as well, what did Nielsen see in the out-of-home TV data compared to radio usage?
Whatever Nielsen does, it won’t be presented as quickly as you’d prefer. This column has shown you the flexibility of the PPM Analysis Tool on a number of occasions and this is the time for you to take advantage of some of those features. Here’s where I would start if I were analyzing Los Angeles radio data to see the effect of the fire coverage on radio listening:
- Use the “day by day” option in Analysis Tool. If you go to the “Trends” option, you’ll find a drop-down box next to the option for “Survey”. The menu defaults to “block”, but click on it and choose the “day” option. This gives you the estimates for each day of the survey. Note: if you choose less than the full week for the daypart, i.e. M-F 6A-7P, AT will not show estimates for the missing days, for this example Saturday and Sunday.
- When you do this run, include “AVG Daily In-Tab” as one of your choices for “Estimates”. Now you’ll see how many panelists were in the sample on each day. If you compare the numbers for each day prior to the fires to the sample during the fires, you’ll get an idea of the effect on the sample.
- In the Nielsen Audio Portal, you should have an option for the Nielsen Audio Analyzer, perhaps the company’s most poorly named tool. The Audio Analyzer doesn’t analyze any audio at all, but it does give you the option to find out your market definition. Once in it, click on the tab “Find Zips by Market” and using the drop-down menu under “Nielsen Radio Metro”, choose Los Angeles. The output will be a list of all the zip codes in the LA Metro.
Here’s where it gets interesting: if you export and save the output as a text file (not Excel format), you can paste it back into the Analyzer using the tab “Zip Code Detail” and then choose “Load Zip List”. Plug the list in and you should get the “city name” for the zip code as the initial list will only tell you the Nielsen geography name, for example, “Los Angeles CS Bal”. If you want to see the zips for Pacific Palisades, Malibu, or Altadena, you can find them this way.
- Now go back to AT. If you choose “Geography”, a box will pop up and one option is Zip Codes. Click on it and you can choose the zips you wish to review from the list, but keep in mind that the sample size must be 30 or more. This can be interesting if you run a set of zips pre-fire and get results, but the system says “no” to your request once the fires started, people left, and the sample dropped off.
The fires are a tragedy for some and a huge story for those who live in the Los Angeles area not to mention something of interest for the rest of the country. Do your own analysis and Nielsen should be getting their presentations and releases ready now; the sooner we know how our medium was used, the better.
Let’s meet again next week.
