More Winners, A New Study and Questioning the Status Quo

First, our congrats to Tom Gjerdrum of Midwest Communications and Armando Rivera for being winners of $100 and $20 respectively in the Instant Win Game that was a part of the interactive webinar we completed last week. We’re practicing what we preach to radio stations about celebrating winners (to push back on the perception that contests are rigged or that we never really give away the prizes).

We’re crunching the numbers now on NuVoodoo Ratings Prospects Study 14 – a fresh set of over 3,000 interviews among 14-54’s across all PPM markets. We’ll be launching a new series of free webinars next month, starting with an update on winning the workplace war. A few of the highlights we’re working on already:

• How much terrestrial radio listening has been co-opted at work by other sources of audio entertainment since we last checked in early 2018.
• The best marketing channels to reach those most likely to spend time with your station at work.
• Contest and sweepstakes opportunities that most interest at-work listeners.
• Tactics beyond contesting for attracting and improving workplace listening.

We spend a lot of time at NuVoodoo questioning the status quo. If we hadn’t, we’d still be:

• Conducting music research by calling people and playing hooks over the phone (instead of conducting our “callout” using well-screened, passively-recruited compensated respondents to collect the information online).
• Sending one-message-fits-all direct mail pieces to huge swaths of a market (instead of personalized, highly-targeted direct mail to only selected people in the most critical locations in town).
• Renting hotel meeting rooms and getting a field service to beg people to come to an “auditorium” music test – and HOPING enough will show up (instead of using our online technology to get the job done with stronger samples and happier respondents).
• Telemarketing to the ever-dwindling number of callable residential landlines, hoping to make enough impressions (instead of calling into workplaces, where the phones get answered and we can impact more potential listeners per call).
• Pleading with people on the phone to answer “just a few more questions” in a perceptual interview that will really take nearly a half hour (instead of using online technology to get the job done better with respondents who are getting paid for participating – just like Nielsen respondents).
• Using mass media to deliver impressions for radio stations (instead of using highly-targeted digital campaigns to bring carefully-crafted messages to the right people at the right times on the right devices).

And one more thing about “status quo.” We’re heading into the season when stations will be making programming adjustments based on ratings performance. It’s important to remember that the first listeners to notice those adjustments… will be listeners who were content with the status quo.

After making changes, many stations’ eventual success is preceded by a dip in the ratings. If the changes are made with sound reasoning and good intel, eventually two things occur:

• Some of those who liked the status quo get accustomed to the changes and listen more.
• Those among the larger group of occasional listeners who weren’t happy with the status quo start listening more.

It takes patience – and guts – to avoid the trap of making changes to the changes and ending up with muddled images, confused listeners and a long cycle of addled ratings.