What If You Could Afford a Perceptual Study & An OMT?

“It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail,” said Abraham Maslow (better remembered for his “hierarchy of needs”). We’re seeing more music tests going into the field with swollen sets of question groups as programmers try to use a music test to serve the function of a music test and a perceptual study. This make-do mentality is understandable, but the samples and the mental modality of the studies aren’t completely interchangeable.

The sample for a music test is typically about one hundred respondents, carefully controlled for station preference (and sometimes screened using music montages). This means we can’t investigate how well a station is converting cumers to core listening. Cume duplication percentages are distorted. The biased sample makes it impossible to get accurate answers to questions about station images or popularity of hosts (and inaccurate answers risk bad decisions). Moreover, the longer, more analytical questions asked in a perceptual can be fatiguing for a respondent who is also rating hundreds and hundreds of hooks.

When performing the primary task of rating hundreds of songs in a music test, we want respondents to simply react much as they would listening to the radio in the car – no analysis, no deep thought. It’s best to keep respondents there giving quick answers about easy things in those question groups – artist names, music eras, what time they get up, etc.

The pair of study types that NuVoodoo has rolled out for 2021 offer an alternative. For less than $10K, OMT Lite runs a full-size music test sample and up to 400 hooks (albeit with no question groups). Also for under $10K, the ASAP Perceptual Study handles as many questions as you could wedge into a full-size music test, but with a 300-person sample. Combined, the two studies are competitive with the cost of a full-size music test, but gain the analytic capabilities and deep dives possible with a larger sample. An email to TellMeMore@NuVoodoo.com will get you details.

NuVoodoo Ratings Prospects Study 18 is coming out of the field now. We’ll be presenting the resulting data in a webinar series kicking off July 21 called “Reboot the Commute,” focusing on getting the biggest shares from the increase in PUMM and PUR in a reopened America. We’ll be looking at where they’re working today (and what they’re listening to while they work) AND where they expect to be working this fall as kids head back to school – and what that means for radio.