What Would You Ask a Big Sample of Radio Listeners?

The picture above is one of Henry Ford. Ford is quoted as saying, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” Those words are in our heads as the NuVoodoo team comes together to draft the questionnaire for our next Ratings Prospects Study (our 22^nd if anyone’s keeping count). It seems appropriate to think of Ford in this moment. After all, his namesake automotive company did just decide to keep AM radios in their vehicles.

We ask some questions in every one of the NuVoodoo Ratings Prospects studies because they’re important to our marketing team as they design programs for client stations. Knowing which Social Media platforms are growing and which are shrinking – and with which demos – is critical. We’re planning to lean in this time to look at whether some “socials” are more appropriate than others for radio stations – at least in the minds of listeners. In many studies we’ve looked at where people are most likely to pay attention to ads, but this time we’ll go further down the funnel to look at which ad media are most likely to get consumers to take action.

It’s like Christmas morning for our team when we get data out of the field on these studies. We’re looking for the shifts in perceptions on the questions we can trend from prior studies. And we’re all fascinated by the responses to questions not asked before. Do the answers fall as we’d imagined? Is there an unexpected story within the data? Of course, we maintain our focus on the respondents who’ll have the biggest and quickest impact on ratings: the likely ratings respondents for which our studies are named and the small subset of that group with big TSL to broadcast radio.

We’ve asked before about which radio station advertising messages are most likely to build tune-ins and we’ve asked about tune-outs. This time, we also want to dive into the messages and tactics that work best to move listeners from daypart to daypart, from day to day, and from one side of a spot break to the other. We’re building a list of the messages that stations use in these recycling efforts – we’d love to include your ideas.

It’s early days having AI host music shows. We’ll be looking for listener reactions to the concept and learning how often listeners believe radio is already using AI. We’re also interested in how listeners feel about hosts from the podcast world doing shows on the radio. It doesn’t seem like a big stretch, but we’ll find out which listeners are most and least receptive and why they feel that way.

If you have ideas about what you’d like to know from a big sample of radio listeners, please share them with us. An email to leigh@nuvoodoo.com or cg@nuvoodoo.com gets our attention – and we promise it’ll also get you a response. We’ll be sharing the results of Ratings Prospects Study XXII on NuVoodoo Live events later this summer to help radio shape programming, promotion, and marketing plans for its fall report card from Nielsen.