Before I get started this week, let me wish everyone a happy and wonderful Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday with family getting together and more food than I should be eating in one sitting. Thanksgiving brings back nice memories as well and I hope yours is joyful. And for once, it might even be worth watching the Detroit Lions game! Along with all of the other holiday changes that go on, there is one that is part of our radio business and that’s Christmas music.
Before you think “Dr. Ed, do you know your audience?” because Jason has not started Barrett Music Media yet (no, that’s not a rumor!), any change in the market, even temporary, affects your audiences as well. Some of my readers may also have responsibilities for music stations in their clusters, so read on.
Back in my Cumulus time, I did some analyses on Christmas music using the day-by-day data in the PPM Analysis Tool (AT). While Cumulus had only a few stations in PPM markets that went all-Christmas, the analyses were enlightening.
As you might expect, all-Christmas peaks in the week or so before the holiday and stays there for a day or two afterward. There is one other peak and that will happen this week, in other words, at Thanksgiving. Despite the fact that our inboxes have been bombarded with Black Friday deals for a few weeks already, the markets I reviewed said you wanted to make the switch a day or two ahead of Thanksgiving.
What about earlier? Plenty of stations have already flipped to all-Christmas as I write this, more than a week before Thanksgiving. Unless there are competitive reasons to flip this early, I’d wait until this week. Take a look at the day-by-day results in mid-November and I’d wager a bit on results that are less than spectacular.
Getting back to the core audience of Jason’s publications, what can you do about Christmas music when you’re running a news/talk or sports talk format? Obviously, there is always something happening in your world that can be discussed. But if you have a few spare minutes, open up AT and check previous years in your market for the Christmas station (and I’m assuming you have only one…some markets have multiples) and ask some questions:
–What day did they switch over?
–Look at the AQH persons and shares on a day-by-day basis through the holiday season
–Check your day-by-day and put it up against the Christmas station. Do you see any correlation? As much as PPM numbers move around, you may see some changes that are out of the ordinary.
–Check the audience sharing between your station and the Christmas station for each week, not just the December or Holiday monthlies. Was the sharing percentage higher than in other months?
If you see that you’ve historically shared more audience than usual because wall-to-wall Christmas music has pulled away some of your audience, try to determine the biggest days for Christmas music. Those are good days for your talent to go on vacation or unless some major story breaks, don’t schedule that great guest. While no competitive programmer or talent wants to concede even a day, sometimes it’s better to choose your battles and fight another time.
I’ve focused on PPM markets because of the ability to see granular data and the fact that measurement is available 365 days a year, but for diary markets, this is less of a concern. The Fall survey period ends on Wednesday, December 6 so the days closest to Christmas are more for serving a need and building cume with all-Christmas than anything else. But don’t assume life is easier in diary markets because you have a measurement-free month!
Quite often, if the diary returns are lagging, Nielsen will bump up the sample in the final weeks in order to ensure that the sample target is made. Keep in mind that the people who make that decision have made the call far earlier than you may think, perhaps three or four weeks into the Fall survey. It doesn’t happen every time, but if the sample is heavy in the latter part of the survey period, this will be the same time that the all-Christmas station is paraphrasing Mariah Carey, “All I Want For Christmas is More Diaries in the Last Three Weeks!”
For diary markets spoken word formats, I’ll make the same suggestion as earlier, but in this case, access the week-by-week information in PD Advantage or Tapscan.
While you may not be able to fight the all-Christmas station in your market with music, you can understand the dynamics better with the information you have in-house. Use it.
Let’s meet again next week.
