It’s that time of year again!  Maybe time to prepare the annual NuVoodoo Ratings Prospects Study isn’t marked on your calendar, but it’s on ours – and we’re eager to build new questionnaires to gather new insights and refresh our understanding of radio’s consumers.  One of the advantages in conducting interviews online is that we…

Experienced broadcasters know it intuitively – that music radio sounds better with a live human introducing the music and relating to the listener. As many times as talented producers are able to whip up cinematic audio magic in the studio, the simple act of a live human voice, communicating one-to-one with a listener often has…

What if we replaced the title “Program Director” with one borrowed from the online world, “Director of User Experience?”  Isn’t that what today’s PD’s really are anyway?  How many actually direct a program during their typical day? Imagine focusing on what users experience when they come or try to come to a radio station.  We…

Nearly 50 years before fictional Jerry’s Maguire’s mission statement, The Things We Think and Do Not Say, the real-life Bill Bernbach, then creative director at Grey Advertising in New York, typed out a letter to his bosses at the agency. If you read Bernbach’s letter and make appropriate substitutions (including replacing “men” with “people” –…

Last week we showed percentages of P1 constituencies from major music formats responding to whether their station had surprised them pleasantly with a song or something other than a song in the past week.  Overall, music radio stations are about half again more likely to have delighted listeners with a song than with something other…

One of our competitors announced that they’re finally following our lead and moving their library music tests from hotel meeting rooms to the internet. We’re glad they’ve caught on. At NuVoodoo we’ve been doing all of our research online since we set up shop at the end of 2010. We’ve been working with recruiting and…

Last week we talked about contests that help delight listeners – and the factors that sometimes get in the way of making those contests delightful. We asserted that contest prizes don’t need to be huge – in fact it’s better if they seem attainable. The greater the perceived chance to win the prize, the greater…

It’s hard to read those words and not hear Jerry Seinfeld wondering about people who are unusual in one sense or another. It’s the question that arose in a casual lobby bar discussion of research samples at the recent NAB Radio Show in Atlanta. The discussion began with someone pondering those who will still cooperate…

Delight.  According to Merriam-Webster it’s “something that makes you very happy; something that gives you great pleasure or satisfaction.”  In other words, it’s what most music radio stations strive to do for listeners every day.  For many years, simply the continuous stream of well-chosen songs was enough to be delightful:  “We let our music do…

In the latest NuVoodoo Ratings Prospect Study we’re again seeing the good news about likely PPM participants – as well as the not-so-good news. As we’ve reported previously, likely PPM participants use more radio than those who would likely eschew the offer of a meter. The self-assessed numbers in our study show PPM Likelies coming…