Posted on: February 15th, 2011 by Keith
The Fall 2010 Arbitron ratings have been released, and Better Merchants wants you to see what the latest numbers mean in regard to potentially placing your advertising dollars on radio. Local newspaper and television provide little or no coverage when these twice-a-year ratings come out, but we still feel it’s important because of the amount of money local businesses are still willing to spend on local radio.
I’m approaching the subject of this most recent set of ratings from more of a “listener composition” point of view. Things are still steady in the “who’s on top with anybody who owns a radio and is at least 12-years-old” sweepstakes: mostly men listening to Real Rock 93-5 (WKHY) and the Rocket (WSHP), mostly women listening to Z-96-5 (WAZY) and B-102-9 (WXXB), and a good chunk of just about everybody from very young to very old loves oldies and country, so Oldies 98.7 (WASK-FM) and K-105 (WKOA) still show notable numbers on the scorecard in just about all demographics.
For example, if K-105 takes a big hit in one demo like “Women 25-54” and/or “Men 35-64”in this book, they’ll make it up in the next book. Z-96-5 took it on the chin with “Women 25-49” the last couple books, but saw substantial gains this time. The one thing you can count on is that country fans are loyal and if you are 12-years-old or 112-years-old, heritage 50,000 watt country station K-105 will be on or near the top in Lafayette. From an October 2010 issue of Rolling Stone (“Who Still Buys CDs? Country Fans”): “(Country music) fans overwhelmingly get their music on CD: 80 percent of them buy that format and only 26 percent download”.
But back to the subject of “listener composition”, what kind of listener is just as important as how many relative to who a small business is targeting. What I found in the Fall 2010 survey most interesting is that the largest percentage and gender of listeners for seven of the top radio stations in the Lafayette market is “Men 18-24”. The “Women 18-24” demo was close behind.
Does your business use radio to target those customers?
Perhaps you may feel strongly about K-105 because of how they do overall “Adults 12+”, but BOB-FM actually beats K-105 in “listener composition” “Adults 25-54″ 53% to 46%. Counting who you reach and reaching who you count need to sorted out in the radio ad buying equation.
In a recent article from Dealerscope.com entitled “Wherefore Art Thou Radio?” Ed Sachs points out that in 2000, 29 percent of 12-24 year olds had a cell phone and in 2010, it’s up to 81 percent, with 40 percent of those being smartphones. “Mostly they text (92 percent), search the Internet (51 percent), play games (50 percent) or use the device for social networking (45 percent)”, Sachs writes, “But important to note: 40 percent of this group use the device to listen to music”.
These younger “music-loving” demographics (slightly more male than female) are the ones who were apparently filling out the most Arbitron diaries this time around and incorporating radio in their routine as much as they can between downloading songs on the internet and playing video games.
Finally, we’ve found that buying radio cheaply and in high frequency is best especially if a Better Merchants client is having a special event or introducing a new product. Other media with higher reach of the audience and narrower focus on the target (television and social networking) will benefit from that additional high frequency/short run radio placement. If you are using radio as your only marketing tool or not running at least 25-30 commercials per week, even the best radio schedule working alone only reaches about 12-15% of the intended audience and could work better coupled with another advertising tool from the marketing tool box.