Moneyball: Three Weeks Until Spring Book

Last week we showed that TikTok is now a part of the Foundational Four platforms for NuVoodoo marketing when demos under 45 are involved. For us that move was based on TikTok’s strong usage numbers among those most likely to participate in the ratings, along with targeting options down to the Zip Code level for TikTok.

And speaking of TikTok – or TICK TOCK: Spring ratings start in roughly 3 weeks as you’re reading this. If you’re awaiting approval of budget for research or marketing, time is getting tighter. Happily, things turn around a lot more quickly than they used to. It’s as little as 3-4 weeks from approved questionnaire and/or hooklist to looking at results for music testing or a tactical perceptual study. These days a marketing campaign can be set up in seven or fewer business days.

We’ve carped about the relatively low numbers overall who say they “smiled of laughed” at something on the radio in the last week in our NuVoodoo Ratings Prospects Studies. Below are the data from our latest study from earlier this year. We devoted a lot of this question group to listener contact with stations. You’ll see that across our nationwide sample of over 3,200 14-54s, only about a quarter of them had any contact with a station in the last week and about 40% or less had any contact in the past month.

With only 22% saying they participated in a station contest in the past week or 38% in the past month, you could conclude that’s an ineffective tactic. But if you drill down to the 17% of the sample likely to participate in the ratings, as shown below, you realize why contesting is more impactful than it might appear. Among those likely to participate in the ratings, labeled “RPS Yes” in the table below, 44% participated in a radio station contest in the past week and 58% in the past month.

The results also make clear the importance of having someone assigned to answering station phones and responding to emails and social media. In every instance, the people far more likely to have reached out are … those likely to give stations their listening report cards. It’s also worth noting that many ratings likelies say they have signed up for (and received) station email newsletters.

Newsletters are a great way to build a database if you’re willing to put in the effort and intellectual property from the station. Once you’ve got a database, you’ve got powerful fuel to drive your audience marketing engine. If you need help or ideas with that – ask us, we think about this stuff constantly.

As we noted last week, we’re skipping the webinar experience this year and offering to show deeper results from our new nationwide study by appointment. We’re enjoying these meetings a lot more than the webinars. We get to communicate with colleagues – not perform like trained seals. We avoid the problem of flying over data that someone is trying to get their arms around and we can answer questions on the fly.

In 20 minutes, you’ll get six key takeaways covering new ground for 2024 to help your radio station play and win the ratings game. Of course, we’re glad to spend as much time as needed to answer questions and talk about the data. An email to tellmemore@nuvoodoo.com will get you scheduled for a presentation of our latest data.