High-Tech Gear Blogger gets Nielsen Radio Diary

January 14, 2009 Steve

Nicholas Deleon, of the well known high-tech gear blog Crunchgear, posted yesterday about the KRI Armband Portable HD Radio Player. Nothing in the HD Radio review that we hadn't seen on Orbitcast, but Nicholas did had one other interesting comment:

In other radio news, my household has been chosen to be a part of Nielsen radio’s stat-tracking thing. (I received the initial “you’ll be getting a giant packaged with official Nielsen materials shortly” yesterday.) The notebook will be filled out thusly: Opie and Anthony, Monday-Friday, 6am-9am, 92.3FM; every other entry will show that, nope, this household is not listening to that drivel known as terrestrial radio. Please plan your business accordingly.

It will be interesting to follow Nicholas' posts as he experiences the new Nielsen service. Since it seems that his household will be reporting listening to only CBS' K-Rock, I guess Cumulus and Clear Channel will be disappointed. My guess is that he's being surveyed for the Westchester market - that being the closest to NYC (home of K-Rock) of the 51 being surveyed. Or - is he getting Nielsen confused with Arbitron and he'll become a PPM panelist?

Blaupunkt introduces Streaming Radio receiver at CES

January 7, 2009 Steve

Dean Takarashi of VentureBeat reports today in the New York Times that Blaupunkt, the German maker of automotive electronics, is introducing an aftermarket car radio that provides the ability to receive streaming radio via bluetooth and a 3G connection on your cell phone:

"With a push of a button, you can switch from AM/FM radio stations to tens of thousands of Internet radio stations. You can browse by country, genre, station and keyword. You can also go to the web portal with a PC and instruct your device to play only certain preset radio stations. That cuts down on the browsing time. If you don’t want to do that, you can cruise through the top 100 feature on miRoamer.com.

The radio gets its music streamed in real time via a Bluetooth connection from the radio to your 3G cell phone. I’m not sure it’s going to work, given the spottiness of 3G coverage in the U.S. But you have to give them credit for trying something ambitious. The Blaupunkt guy told me that if you’re speeding fast, you will need higher bandwidth to make sure the radio reception doesn’t get choppy. There may be a reason no one has tried Internet radio in the car before, but if it works, it’s going to change the landscape for players like XM Sirius satellite radio.

It will cost $349 to $399 in the U.S. when it ships in the second half of the year. There will be two versions, one that occupies a single radio deck in a car and another that occupies two. It’s not clear whether Blaupunkt will charge a subscription fee or will make it avaiable for free."

Now, aside from the fact that this particular implementation seems a little "Rube Goldberg," the fact that a major aftermarket car radio manufacturer is introducing such a device is a big thing.

The time is coming closer where if a terrestrial broadcaster doesn't have a strategy for streaming their audio, they will be severely impacted by lack of exposure to the mobile audience. Of course, if a broadcaster sticks to a very local strategy, then this won't matter. But - imagine a local AM station having the ability to keep a listener from awakening in the morning to bed time at night, with a signal that reaches their audience at home, in the car on their commute way outside the AM's coverage area, in the office streaming on their PC or on an IP-enabled desktop radio, on the homebound commute, and finally back at home again. Couple that with the potential for interactivity provided by IP radio and you have a potent mix.

So - where does this put HD Radio? As much as I love what some stations are doing with HD Radio, it has little to do with the technology (aside from providing more audio channels) and everything to do with content. If companies like Blaupunkt roll out streaming radio receivers for cars, what's the real advantage to a radio station for investing in HD Radio? With IP radio streamed into the car, you can have all the advantages of HD Radio without the license fees to Ibiquity. And, this advantage accrues not just to the broadcaster, but to the manufacturer as well. It appears that technology and economics may be passing HD Radio by.

Radio Advertisers - where are the retailers?

January 6, 2009 Steve

After being inundated with news about the shocking declines in sales for retailers of all stripes last week, today a report by Media Monitors shows that only 3 of the top ten national radio advertisers last week were retailers. In fact, except for McDonald's, all the rest were services. Here's the chart:

Most of these advertisers are the most successful in their categories - and those that aren't are aggressively pursuing that success. So - why aren't more major retailers on this list - during the week that can make or break sales for the year? I would have expected Best Buy, Borders, WalMart, Costco, and the hundreds of other retailers who are beating their competition - yet still suffering from the economic conditions - to be part of this list. Not for brand advertising - but for hard hitting, direct response, traffic-building advertising.

Media Monitors data is a terrific sales tool for radio; we can now take a list of advertisers using radio, with the actual count of spots that they used, and match it up against the retail growth of the advertisers. The data can be sliced and diced by market, target demographic, and matched up against real retail sales data for the market. In PPM markets, we can match up with audience data to see an estimate of how many people heard the ads and correlate that to actual sales. And - unlike post-analysis done by agencies for their clients - this information is available to anyone willing to subscribe to it.

This is a game-changer for smart radio sales people if their employers subscribe to the service. Even if they don't, there's enough public information to allow a creative seller to use the new data to solidify an argument for radio. Armed with this data, we can bring more retail advertisers into radio, show them how to achieve the success of advertisers like Geico, and then provide data on the backside that will allow tracking of actual response.

Harker Research posts update to Nielsen vs Arbitron Survey

December 23, 2008 Steve

Harker Research just posted an update to their article of December 5th on a survey that they conducted of media buyers, researching buyers' reaction to Nielsen's entry into measuring radio. In a very thoughtful exposition of their original conclusions, the researchers bring more clarity to their conclusions. They also posted a brief description of the methodology used in their research:

Nielsen versus Arbitron: Why It Matters to Radio: "How the study was conducted

Our clients provided the contact information for nearly 100 key radio media buyers. The media buyers were those who regularly buy radio, so the views expressed were from the perspective of the radio time buying community, and presumably would favor Arbitron. By telephone Harker Research interviewers contacted as many of these buyers as possible during the week of December 1st. We ultimately completed interviews with 62. This is a significant proportion of the universe of media buyers, so the results are a reliable representation of the views of all radio oriented media buyers.

We first confirmed that the participant bought radio time and then proceeded to ask the four questions. For each comparison question they could choose either Arbitron or Nielsen as a response, but we also accepted 'don’t know' or 'both.' That is why the two responses do not add to 100%.
"

(Via Radio InSights.)

One point made in their article was that there hadn't been much made of cross-media measurement with PPM. Here's the quote:

"While Arbitron has touted PPM as a means to measure any audio based medium, there has been very little said by the company about actually measuring any medium other than radio (except in special commissioned projects). This is one area where Nielsen is clearly ahead of Arbitron. If Nielsen follows through with its promises, small markets may have a new tool to compete against other media. Let’s hope that Arbitron responds by providing the same information (at no charge) in larger markets."

Arbitron actually conducted some very in-depth research into the multi-media aspects of PPM, with live data being made available during both the Houston and Philadelphia test periods. In fact, the MRC accredited the data in Houston just over a year ago. Here's a link to the RBR article about that: Arbitron gets MRC Blessing for PPM TV data

The competition between Arbitron and Nielsen will only make both services get better - and that bodes well for both sellers an buyers of tv and radio advertising.

Signs of the season - Christmas carols whilst cleaning out your desk...

December 22, 2008 Steve

This weekend, as I was preparing for the week, I ran across John Gorman's site and this post on some of the signs of the season:

Radio: The Grim Reaper is the new Santa Claus: "I’ll tell it like it is. The Grim Reaper is the new Santa Claus.

It’s a bummed-out Christmas for our industry.

The bad news far outweighed the good.

A survivor of a recent massacre called to tell how surreal it was. One of their other stations had changed to its annual continuous Christmas format – and its music was being piped through the building as terminated employees were being escorted from the building.

There’s nothing like being ordered to leave the premises while Burl Ives sings ‘Have a holly jolly Christmas.’

Our industry used to be fun. On a good day it didn’t seem like work – and even the bad days were good."

(Via John Gorman's Media Blog.)

Pretty eerie stuff.

After getting your attention, John gets down to the meat of the matter - that radio needs to focus on doing better radio. This means many things, but above all it means keeping the passion in the presentation - whether delivered via 100,000 watt transmitters or streamed via WiMax or anything in between.

One of the most powerful tools that radio people have at their disposal theses days is the concept of "social networking." This is no secret to anyone who has been following the radio cognoscenti recently; but how we go about it is still somewhat opaque to most.

The fact is, radio has been a "social network" all along. People have a shared experience listening to their favorite station; some contribute "user generated content" (calls to Limbaugh and Hannity), some attend concerts, remote broadcasts, listener parties, live recording sessions, and so on. This social networking around radio has been going on since well before I was born. It's what attracted many of us to the business to begin with.

So - we need to expand our social networking experience to take advantage of new venues, whether they be Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or an iPhone application like Radiolicious. Use technology like Messagecasting (customized messaging to RDS displays on radios) to create even more powerful ties to your people (for example, crowdsource an event by messaging over Twitter and your Messagecasting channel). Tie it all together with a way for your advertisers to tap into this powerful network.

This is what radio folks have been doing forever. But, we have strayed from the path of providing genuineness to our listener. One thing we can't do is be disingenuous with these new social networking tools. That is the kiss of death, since the response mechanisms for the listener are so available, so immediate.

There's a challenging year ahead, but we can make this the year we re-confirm that radio does connect to lives in a powerful way.

Jerry Del Colliano on "Radio To Die For"

December 18, 2008 Steve

Jerry's posts - although usually very long - are usually right on the money. But, this one is way off the mark:

Radio To Die For: "Fact is -- radio stopped making compelling content over twenty years ago. We're noticing it more today because radio has become a vacuous entertainment medium that values business over show and thinks it can get away with stuffing cheap commercials into five-minute clusters."

(Via INSIDE MUSIC MEDIA™.)

There's a lot of compelling content on terrestrial radio; NPR and PRI programming certainly, but I also hear a lot of great programming from commercial stations as well. Typically these are the independent stations (here in the DC area, WRNR comes to mind; in the Boston area, WXRV is a safe bet) - it seems that the corporate-owned stations are the ones that Jerry is speaking of.

So I ask you - do you know of some corporate-owned radio stations providing compelling content? Add a comment and a link to the station's site so we can check them out. Let's show Jerry that there's some great radio being done by the folks who are toiling under the yolk of the shareholders.

Radio and Social Media

December 10, 2008 Steve

Monday, Radio Business Report ran an article on Media Mixing - social media and radio. It is a well thought-out analysis of how radio stations should approach the combinations of social media (like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and so on) and their "brand."

The author, Marivic Valencia, has a Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/techpr. I added her to my friends list; she quickly returned the favor. We exchanged a few tweets about her article. My questions were about how a station might use its RDS "Now Playing" feed as a Twitter feed as a way to serve the audience through Twitter.

Then, today, I read a post on the site Social Media Influencers about a research study that says that corporate blogs are among the least trusted types of blogs out there. The study, from Forrester Research, says:

"...people do not trust corporate blogs –which rank below newpapers, portals, wikis, direct mail, company email and message board posts in the trustworthiness stakes."

There's a great graphic that illustrates the problem - showing that email from people we know is the most trusted source of information with a score of 77%; magazines, Radio and TV are all clustered around a 39% (Radio, magazines) and 38% (TV) score. "Social networking profiles from a company or brand" and "company blogs" rank dead last, trusted by only 18% and 16% of respondents, respectively.

So - where does this put the social networking efforts of radio stations? The answer is obvious - they need to be "real" and not a confection of the promotions department. A feed of the "Now Playing" information can be a good thing - it's real - and should be experimented with. But this should be augmented with personal posts by the talent at the station - making the feed useful beyond knowing what is on the air right now. Also - it would be good for the station to follow their followers; you'll get some great insight into what's going on with your P1s - because that's obviously who your followers are.

Bottom line - because of Radio's personal and local nature, a radio station's social networking efforts will reap great rewards for both the station and the listener. But keep in mind that if you aren't honest and forthright with your social networking, you'll end up at the bottom of Forrester's next study.