If you remember the days before the Arbitron people meter, you probably recall just how little information we had about radio listening and the behaviors that drive it. The diary was all about recall, so a big part of gaming that system was to market stations heavily, hoping that Arbitron respondents would remember to write you down in their weekly radio listening diary.
Enter PPM, and all that changed. We quickly learned about attention spans, the pros and cons of teasing, occasion setting, quick “on-ramps,” and even stopset placement. And while it may be argued that some wrong conclusions were made – especially early on – those meters shed a lot of light on the ways in which people consume radio.
As consultants who work in big, medium and small markets, it just made sense to apply some of that PPM learning to diary situations. After all, the lessons about listening behavior that were gleaned from PPM simply make sense in the simpler methodological world of the diary.
But now there’s a new measurement paradigm in town – streaming via mobile apps – and it’s potentially changing the way we understood listening in a metered world. As platforms like Pandora and Spotify have come to learn over the past few years, the speed at which people make choices, listening sessions, playlist construction, and many other characteristics can be better understood thanks to skipping and usage behavior in their apps. To a great degree, this gives them a distinct advantage over broadcast radio, at best staring at Media Monitors timelines, trying to understand why meters are coming and going.
Until now.
The NPR One app (pictured above), which we honored in our “Radio’s Most Innovative” series earlier in the year, is truly changing the learning curve for understanding radio listening – at least when it comes to quality spoken word programming. In case you haven’t tried it, NPR One is a lot like a Pandora version for public radio stations, giving the user the ability to skip stories, rewind 15 seconds at a time, and perform other functions previously not available to radio listeners.
As the app becomes more popular and racks up some nice usage statistics (around 30 minutes per session), NPR digital and news staffers find they have a treasure trove of data available to them. In much the same way PPM featured more granularity about radio usage and behavior than the recall-based diary, an app like NPR One exponentially provides more metrics about how we use mobile devices, how we consume news, and our overall patience level for sitting through a news story that may not initially draw us in.
The chart below is a great example of this amazing data resource, showing how NPR users access the app by device. Surprisingly, the most common playback option for listening to NPR One is using the speaker on their smartphones, followed by headphones. Who knew?
The NPR One team has been quite transparent about some of the things they’re learning about mobile news consumption. A recent detailed article in Nieman Lab chronicles how the public radio national network is using this data to learn more about listening behavior. In “Deciphering what the next generation of public radio listeners want through NPR One,” writer Justin Ellis tells the story about how NPR is learning about everything from story flow to insights about personalized public radio content.
It is interesting that in commercial radio, tech achievement is often looked upon as a way to generate revenue. Early on, broadcasters viewed streaming, social media, and now podcasts as new money streams, rather than as new platforms and avenues in which the audience might be better served and entertained. So it is with mobile apps, and the data that a creation like NPR One can produce that can help provide a better UX or User Experience. Too often “Big Data” is strictly viewed as a sales tool rather than a way to help programmers create better products.
As I read deeper into the Nieman Lab article, Sara Sarasohn, the editorial lead for NPR One, talked about the nuances of skip patterns, story flow, and algorithms in an effort to prevent users from bailing out of stories. And what’s fascinating about her observation is that it goes well past the data, and reminds us about the most important part of programming a radio station or building a mobile app:
“What I want to give people is not just the thing they will tolerate enough that they won’t skip it – but the thing they love.”
So often we get caught up in the construction of clocks, the architecture of music scheduling, and the intricacies of ratings analysis that we lose sight of the importance of creating programming, promotions, and digital content that enlightens, enchants, and entertains. All the hot new technical platforms, feature-laden apps, and slick video production mean nothing if the product isn’t truly worthy of people’s time.
Of course, data matters more than ever in an advertising world that requires increasing accountability. But a strong database, a black box in the rack room, and an elegant texting platform cannot make up for personalities, programming, information, and entertainment that draws us back to the content, whether we’re listening on a cheesy clock radio, a center stack, or by using a slick app on an iPhone 6 Plus.
It is interesting that NPR became famous for creating “Driveway Moments” – those times when a story or program was so fascinating and mesmerizing that people sat in their cars to hear the conclusion. Ironically, the NPR One app eliminates the need to spend time in the garage or parking structure because the content can be paused or it can travel with you via the app.
But that shouldn’t stop NPR from trying to keep making them.
Data, apps, and new technology aside, it’s about making content that people love.
Jacobs Media has consistently walked the walk in the digital space, providing insights and guidance through its well-read national Techsurveys.
In 2008, jacapps was launched - a mobile apps company that has designed and built more than 1,300 apps for both the Apple and Android platforms. In 2013, the DASH Conference was created - a mashup of radio and automotive, designed to foster better understanding of the "connected car" and its impact.
Along with providing the creative and intellectual direction for the company, Fred consults many of Jacobs Media's commercial and public radio clients, in addition to media brands looking to thrive in the rapidly changing tech environment.
Fred was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2018.
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Making Radio Cool starts with getting
Out of idebt but that aside, I signed on and ran Indie 103.1 in LA with Rolling Stone soon after calling
it the hippest station in the U.S.
Very simple equation to me as a former
LA market manager: make sure there
are always projects going on in your cluster who’s at least secondary goal is to be hip. It will take some of your time and to some appear not to be the most productive use of your time, but you have other projects focused on pure profits and / or community service)—
Easy to decide to have a certain number of very hip projects going each year that may not make much money annually but are very cool—
An easy and fun way to run a progressively hipper industry that then reflects on all the stations — improving profits, morale, recruitment, press etc…—
That was part of the plan I employed to get Clear Channel LA under Randy Michaels to still a record $300m in Revs / $175m in cash flow —Until someone like John Hogan comes in for 11 years (only 3 while I was there) and literally could not understand a hip concept to save his life — gets in charge of the largest radio company for a decade?
I was marginalized by this unhip CEO for years due to his own insecurity issues. Hogan was only removed 15 months ago — After 11 years of his boring, negative, unhip, retaliatory approach to radio, things seems much better rapidly. Unfortunately for radio, it got John Hogan and lots of debt right as many new online and mobile toys hit! Radio like any industry is a few bold ideas away from rapid growth and returning to a hip mindset —
Bob Pittman gets it and he has only been without Hogan dragging him down for 15 months!
Hogan was so extremely miscast as the CEO of the biggest radio company it is hard to fully demonstrate his negative impact on radio. He literally was so over his head, he bragged “you are your number”! He was proud that he only cared about the money! To be a great leader in radio, the people in the industry have to love you back because you loved them first! You loved them enough to invest your extra time to making radio hip as well as do your daytime job of meeting the financial targets and appreciating the people doing it!
We sold out Dodger Stadium, the Rose Bowl and Anaheim stadium for Wango Tango over 3 years with massive positive press, awestruck clients, proud staff members and all Hogan cared about was “improving the margin” so much so he opted to fire me and scale down these stadium monstrosities to as he bragged, “the same profit, with a lot less work” in small arenas.
If radio simply did a 180 from everything Hogan did for 11 years, it would be well on it’s way to hip and more profitable.
There’s no question that Roy Laughlin is a genius and built a lasting dynasty that continues to dominate the Southland thanks to the amazing teams he managed over the years, but before we do a complete 180 lets really study how our streaming listeners use us across all our platforms.
Now that Voltair has “proven” (to me at least) that PPM technology misses a lot of usage, it is tempting to go backward to what we did before, but the industry embraced PPM because of the many flaws of the old diary, not the least of which is the move from landline phones to mobile devices.
Let’s accept that the landscape has completely changed and make use of all the tools in our kit to understand what aspects of our programming work best in each potential venue and customize our content to make the most of all the ways our target is using and will use the new and old technologies based on adoption and usage.
Just as NPR has employed Podcasting to move from their “non-commercial” crowd-source funding over the air analog model to become commercial competition for traditional radio, all of the audio business simply must be open to new business models the internet is opening up.
Also, since anyone who has seen minute-by-minute reports of streaming usage at local radio stations and compared them to Nielsen PPM data in the same time period know that the two track each other quite accurately, let’s hope that a new, more reliable audience measurement matrix evolves soon that can combine everything we now know about how listeners behave, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Jaye, Would never disagree with your programming insights. As you accurately pint out, 180 degrees is overly aggressive.
However, to create impact to the itimeline that Bob Pittman has only run iHeart without Hogan for less than 2 years was the focus of my point. Affer 11 years of Hogan, in 2 years I think Bob has done a great job relaunching the Radio Music Awards with John Miller at NBC whom the Ckear Channel LA cluster worked with to launch this show many years ago before Higan killed that as well. Interesting side story to make the point– Hogan actually fired me DURING a sold out stadium for Wango Tango because of the “bad profit margins” on non-spot revenue as the massive firework show went off he wanted cancelled! Who would have thought he would stay til the end of the show? 🙂
Roy (and Jaye), thanks for continuing this comment thread (as well as you own conversation!). History is helpful in understanding what may have gone right or gone wrong, but so many people take the revisionist view that (like Jaye), the only way I can untangle this is to just look forward and we should be doing right here right now. It’s a challenging landscape, but I know the one thing we can agree on is that radio has some great assets. Now we have to work harder to bring them to consumers without getting caught up in radio’s “isms.” It’s a tough putt, but it can be done. Thanks to both of you.
Thanks for the feedback.
The topic I was responding to was making radio cool.
I thought the historical view of a very
Uncool President at a huge radio company for a decade may be a fundamental place to start in the conversation of turning around the cool-factor of radio?
I was not trying to be revisionist when I complimented Bob Pittman on having
a good grip on this hip approach to media nor do I think anyone would disagree that John Hogan is nearly 180 degrees from hip! With Bob Pittman only being less than 2 years into his role without the very uncool previous President of Clear Channel dragging him down — Seems like he is doing some cool stuff in a short period of time!
And I didn’t mean to come across that way – just want to try to keep moving forward. There’s no question that Bob has brought gravitas and excitement to his company with the iHeartRadio platform. I would so much love to see the sales tail to follow. Thanks, Roy, and appreciate you reading our blog.