Articles

Within our world of radio, it would have been a wonderful job for Gilda Radner’s Saturday Night Live character, Emily Litella, to ask “What’s all this fuss I keep hearing about Voltaire on the radio? Sure, he was the French philosopher who said, ‘Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.’ That might…

Many of us accept that radio’s role in the music discovery process for consumers is pretty much assured for some time far into the future.  For so many years radio was the primary, if not only place for a large percentage of consumers to hear new music releases for free – and to experience these…

Not that many years ago the prescription for higher radio station ratings was to call Filmhouse, pay them for one of their successful syndicated TV commercials, buy 400 GRPs per week for 4-6 weeks and wait confidently for higher numbers when the book came out months later. While that heavy TV strategy might still work…

Having a bunch of ads, occasional grocery coupons, movie listings, notices of who died yesterday, yesterday’s closing stock prices, a handful of blog posts and a round-up of yesterday’s news printed out and delivered to your door made sense for many of us in the not-too-distant past.  Many newspaper editorial departments believed that it was…

A few managers and programmers continue to deny that Pandora and its peers are competitors for radio. We’re wondering how many quarter hours they need to lose to these new sources before they begin treating them as competition. Not that many years ago in our work with television stations we’d encounter station managers who didn’t…

When we asked consumers in our NuVoodoo 2016 Ratings Prospects Study how much time they spend with FM or AM radio and Pandora, stack up those who listen at least an hour a day – and then sift the results by household income (abbreviated “HHI” here), the results are sobering.  Among the highest earners in…

Thirty or more years ago, radio stations asked listeners to do all sorts of things to enter contests – and, if the prizes were sufficiently enticing, enough people participated that radio stations never thought twice about promo copy that went something like, “All you have to do to win is …” and then go on…

Years ago music research was a secret weapon for stations in larger markets.  Those early music tests were often counter-intuitive for programmers – this can’t be right, a song that’s a big hit has terrible scores … a stiff has great scores.  Stations that took the information to heart and used it to re-engineer their…

How do music radio stations and morning shows fare against Social Media when it comes to importance in daily lives of consumers? When we asked over 2100 respondents across all PPM markets in the most recent NuVoodoo Ratings Prospect Study, the results were drawn across generational lines. With any 25+ demo slice, their favorite music…

We’ve shown previously that most likely ratings participants respond positively to radio station contests.  So, contesting remains an important component in any programming and marketing team’s toolset.  The challenge is building a contest that will influence listener behavior (and, more to the point, ratings-participant behavior) while not spending any more than necessary. In our most…