Last week, I riffed on some comments heard from the stage of the BSM Summit in Chicago, including blasting how impressions are credited in digital media as well as recounting the history of the Nielsen simulcast rules.
If I’m going to bitch and moan, the onus is to offer suggestions as to how to improve the system. Let’s get started.
Over my two years of writing for Barrett Media, I’ve raised the AM issue multiple times, including a recent review of the actual text of the “AM For Every Vehicle Act”. If you’re a regular reader, you know that Nielsen overstates AM listening.
Last week, I mentioned comments at the BSM Summit from Andy Roth of 680 The Fan in Atlanta. He had a simple question as PD of an AM sports talker: how much of my listening comes from the AM signal and how much from the FM translator? The answer is “no one knows,” because Nielsen does not provide separate encoders for translators. Their reasoning makes sense: FCC rules allow a translator to originate no more than 30 seconds of material per hour, so why have a separate encoder?
Here’s a suggestion: Nielsen could supply encoders to a random sample of translators in PPM markets (perhaps 20-30 translators), but we’ll make a randomization exception here and choose Andy’s station as well since it was his question. Let the experiment run for six months and then report the results to the industry.
Next, considering what is acceptable in the digital world, let’s update the arcane PPM simulcast rules. The simplest idea is “anything goes,” and here’s what I mean by that phrase.
Let stations encode everything without worrying about the spots. The only caveat is that the stream code should be used for everything that doesn’t go through the transmitter. For example, if your morning show is live on YouTube, Facebook, or wherever, encode it on the fly. Do you take the best bits of the day and run them on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc, for later consumption? Use the digital code.
The plan is to take Nielsen out of the buy/sell process beyond supplying data. Sellers can offer a broadcast estimate, a digital estimate, or a combo. Buyers can buy whatever works best for their objectives.
This change would reduce the workload inside the station (I hope!). The ancient Nielsen simulcast rules require running material online exactly as it was heard on-air, commercials and all. Let’s drop that. If digital can get away with the joke of a measurement standard covered last week as well as the egregious level of fraud, why is radio like Hebrew National “answering to a higher authority”?
Let’s move on to modeling, specifically for streaming. Just about everyone in the radio business gripes about the small PPM sample sizes, and that’s fair. The problem is that the sample costs a bundle and Nielsen lacks any incentive to increase the sample size. No broadcaster will ever say “I’d like to give Nielsen more money”.
Nielsen has a system in place for adding demographics to streaming. Unfortunately for any other company in the space, the Nielsen system is patented (US patent 10,699,286) and if Nielsen is good at nothing else, their legal department excels at going after competing companies for potential patent infringement. Even if the accusations are a stretch, the legal costs and delays chill other entrants.
If we want something better, the industry might as well invite Nielsen back into the streaming business. This is not a knock on Triton, but in my view, the greater need is to have more information around radio’s digital audience. Don’t like modeling? We’ve had it in various forms for years.
One other issue that came up at the BSM was the continuing gripe about the measurement of headphone usage. Nielsen has made the best of a bad situation as PPM was never designed to handle listening through headphones. We remember the clunky “cap” for the old “pager” meter and the crazy additional wires. The watch version can’t handle it.
I remember attending an NAB COLRAM meeting during the Dallas NAB Radio Show in 2019. Dr. Gary Heller from Entercom (now Audacy) and I were chatting, and we agreed that Nielsen should give up and model the headphone listening data using a survey. Nielsen presented the next day with exactly that plan and implemented it. Typically, they do an annual survey of panelists and ex-panelists asking about headphone usage for radio listening. At the BSM, Nielsen’s John Snyder said the company has compared their data to Edison Research’s results and the two are “similar”, whatever that means.
Here’s the rub: Again, we need to count all listening. How about headphone listening to radio segments on other platforms? To the best of my knowledge, the current system doesn’t cover this and while it may be small potatoes, every bit counts. Nielsen should add a couple more questions to the survey or broaden the current questions to add more listening.
We’re in a new era. In the past, the broadcast radio silo could deal with rules set by Arbitron and then Nielsen defining what counted as listening and what did not.
In today’s world, there are so many options for listeners that it’s time to let the marketplace do the work. Nielsen should collect as much data as possible and let buyers and sellers, or in some cases, algorithms and AI, hash it out. Sure, Nielsen needs to maintain some policies, for example, what is measured and reported, but the time to dictate exactly what counts with respect to spots has passed. As one of the insipid slogans on NFL sidelines states “Inspire Change”.
A personal note: I’m shocked to say that this is my 100th column for Barrett Media. When I started, my assumption was that I’d run out of ideas after a couple of months, but two years later, here we are. Thank you so much for being a reader and I hope you’ve learned something and perhaps had a laugh or two. I’ll keep going and I hope you’ll keep reading!
Let’s meet again next week.
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