It’s been years since one of the big buzz topics in radio was the ratings. Sure, everyone obsesses about the numbers, whether you’re measured by meters, diaries, or over the phone. But for the most part, the rules of the game haven’t changed all the much. Even the newest of the methodologies – PPM – has been pretty stable since its inception as the ratings “currency” back in 2007-08.
Until now.
If you’re in the radio business you pretty much have to be aware of the new “3 minute” crediting rule that just went into effect during this past January’s PPM monthly. Of course, the system has been predicated on achieving an aggregate 5 minutes of listening in any configuration within any of all of the four standard 15-minute periods in order to get credit for one quarter-hour worth of listening. All this happened during a 10-month period – light speed for a policy shift of this complexity and weight.
How big a deal is this? It’s big. First Arbitron and later Nielsen both demonstrated to radio programmers the many 15-minute periods where stations earned some amount of listening, but not the required five minutes.
Now that’s changed, and pretty much everyone is talking about it. Like the 30-second pitch clock rule that went into effect two seasons ago in Major League Baseball to speed up the game, broadcast radio is grappling with its own tectonic shift in its benchmark measurement – Nielsen’s PPM ratings.
I wrote a much-discussed blog post two weeks ago, and a lot of you asked good questions about this change, what it implies and as importantly, what it doesn’t. I also heard a number of misconceptions about “The 3-Minute Rule.” You can read that post here.
One of those who reached out was the Managing Director, Nielsen Audio – Rich Tunkel. He’s got more than a quarter century of experience with audience measurement, starting with Scarborough, later with Arbitron, and since the sale, Nielsen.
We exchanged views and ideas, and Rich agreed to answer my questions. I promised five questions, but ending up sending nine. I let Rich know he could skip any one(s) he didn’t wish to answer. He graciously responded to them all. Here are his answers, with no editing for content, just clarity. I’ve asked him to keep an eye on your comments today/tomorrow so he can address other questions that arise.
Fred Jacobs: Rich, talk about how the new “3 Minute Accreditation Rule” came to be. Is it something broadcasters spearheaded or was it a Nielsen initiative?
Rich Tunkel: This was a great lesson in the importance of questioning convention and challenging the current standard. The 5-minute rule has been around since the advent of radio measurement, implemented over a hundred years ago. It’s always important to ask, “Is there a better way?”
This process began with some of our broadcast clients seeking to capture credit for listening around the quarter hour break, yielding more options for commercial placement and an improved radio listener experience. From there it was a partnership between the broadcasters, agencies and Nielsen. The vast majority of programming clocks place their commercials on the quarter-hour break. This is because programmers know they’re less likely to get credit for that listening anyway. If we could recapture that uncredited audience, it would give programmers more freedom with their stopsets.
Changing our crediting rules to account just for “split” 5-minute listening occasions (to credit the quarter-hour containing 3 of those 5 minutes) was complex, time consuming, expensive, and required the development of an entirely new system. During an internal Nielsen review, it was suggested that a more elegant and holistic solution would be to change the qualifier for all quarter hours to 3 minutes—but we needed data proving a broader change was justified and beneficial.
Nielsen’s Data Science, Product and Encoding teams worked together to evaluate the impact and the “codes-to-credit” rules used in generating audience estimates before weighing in with their support. Simultaneously, our Insights team worked to evaluate how listeners actually engage with radio, ultimately finding that nearly half of radio occasions are shorter than 5 minutes. In fact, the median length of all the uncredited occasions we saw in PPM markets was 3 minutes. It also just so happens that a typical song is 3 minutes in length, begging for measurement to be more closely aligned with content.
Agencies were also supportive of the change. They felt that the “3 minute rule” makes sense against other media in today’s landscape and provides a more complete view of the audience listening to their commercials.
FJ: You guys are famous for pre-testing enhancements to the ratings. What did you do to ensure “3 minutes” would be viable and considered “good research?”
RT: In addition to the steps mentioned above, we shared our data and findings with the Media Rating Council staff and the MRC Audio committee. We reviewed the plan with the Audio Alliance, Advisory Council, The RAB, NAB’s COLRAM committee, the NRRC and all of our clients in PPM markets. I’ve rarely seen an initiative with as much broad and unified support from both the buying community and broadcasters. We also shared our findings with the MRC’s CPA auditors and committed to providing ongoing analyses related to the 3-minute rule to them. (The selfie below was taken at that first Audio Alliance meeting at Nielsen headquarters in NYC in June 2024.)
Internally, one of our heaviest lifts was to ensure there were no unforeseen impacts to our production process, our software platforms, nor impacts to the third party software systems. While it sounds simple to change a “5” to a “3” in our methodology, there were a lot of assumptions we had to verify and test. In the end, our production team executed flawlessly and our systems handled the change well.
FJ: Who are the winners in all this? Any losers?
RT: This is really an initiative where the industry wins together: The advertiser gets more complete credit for the audience they reach at the moments when their commercial airs; the broadcaster gets the audience credit – they can understand more about listening occasions and they get more freedom to place commercials when it works for them and their audience. Lastly, the audience wins when more of their listening counts and when stations can depart from the same copy-cat stopset placement strategy.
FJ: As my blog pointed out, radio people often look at methodological changes, and make judgments about who they favor – demographics, formats, platforms, etc. That’s already happening, based on your testing last year and the first month of “currency” – January. What are the cautions you’d recommend they consider? What is the best way to analyze and understand this change?
RT: It’s still early with only one full month of data out – it’s only the first inning of the game. Radio’s listening levels naturally vary throughout the year, and ratings at the market-level are
impacted by many factors including weather and news events—not to mention programming changes. The best advice I can give is to have patience and analyze the change over several months before drawing conclusions. In the first month of data we did see that the change is having the impact we expected; January audience levels were the highest they’ve been since 2021, gains were more significant in markets with younger populations and there were gains across the board on all format types.
My recommendation for a local station is to zoom-out, look at multi-market results where possible and dive into PD advantage to understand the change in your audience. Also, realize the fundamentals of good programming are still very much the same. Getting more people to listen more often is still the name of the game – daily cume and daily occasions are still what move the needle for ratings.
FJ: What can stations do to better understand how “3 Minutes” affects them? Would you recommend audience research they might do?
RT: First, I would remember this is one month, and I would be hesitant to make any major decisions based on a single month of data. Understand that the move to 3 minutes represents a trend break. It’s natural to look at year-over-year comparisons or, in this case, look back to a book before the holidays (and Christmas music) impacted listening levels. As previously mentioned, there is natural seasonality as well as annual attrition to take into account, too. Then, start it with the basics… Daily TSL and Daily cume. Most likely, if your daily cume went up, so did your AQH (persons and ratings).
One possibility is that the increase in daily cume means you brought new listeners to your station each day. The other is that those listeners were always there but were not being credited. Finally, be aware that the number of occasions and time spent per occasion has not really changed so don’t be alarmed. How can that be? Those estimates are averages, so while your heavy listeners are now giving you a brand new 9th and 10th listening occasion during the week, there is also a brand new listener showing up with one occasion bringing down the average.
Once stations get their levels set around those factors, we recommend using some of the advanced programming views found in PD Advantage to get a feel for how a format is performing
compared to national averages and how the impact of their commercial breaks is playing out using some of the Media Monitors insights found in the tool. We also created a group email address that clients can use to submit questions – a large group of subject matter experts see it: [email protected]
FJ: My blog mentioned the old “Arbitron Fly-Ins” that took place any time there was a significant development involving audience ratings. Could Nielsen create “Zoom Ins” (you can have that) to use virtual meetings to share trends, findings, case studies, best practices, and give clients a chance to ask questions?
RT: It’s a great idea and something we can look to create. If there is an audience for this type of content, we would be happy to do it.
FJ: Should radio broadcasters experiment around “3 Minutes” or stick with their current strategies?
RT: Any time there is change, it opens room for creativity and experimentation. So I do think it will now be time to try new things that benefit the listener and create better engagement (success = more listeners coming back more often). If you have a large cluster or operate across multiple markets, it gives you space for a control and test market. With smaller operations, experimenting with dayparts is clearly the way to do it, but you’ll need more months to establish a baseline under the “3 minute rule.” Whichever way you go, just make sure you’ve got a strong base line for comparison.
FJ: Diary markets still use “5 Minutes” as the crediting standard. But is there anything stations measured by diaries can learn from the new PPM rule?
RT: In the diary method, people really don’t write down short duration occasions. The granularity of a 3-minute occasion is something that can only be seen with electronic measurement. But I
think the principle understanding of how listeners use radio is very transferable and instructive. The fact that new audiences tune into your dial position at every minute of the day is critical to understand and can inform how often you do a reset within a segment and welcome newly-arriving listeners. It also means that it is critical to always deliver what your listeners come to you for and to be “on-brand” all the time.
FJ: Any other changes in the pipeline you can talk about?
RT: As far as the PPM methodology and measurement for radio, we are evaluating an update to the headphone adjustment. We collect survey data and update the headphone adjustment lift approximately every 18 months. Our last lift update was in January 2024. We are currently exploring the use of external survey data in order to lessen the timeframe between updates.
Beyond modernizing radio measurement, we have quite a bit we’re working on to improve the way radio shows up in media planning, buying and outcomes. This involves the introduction of radio into the advanced audience marketplace which would allow advertisers to buy radio impressions against the same advanced audience targets as video and digital. We’ve also worked with industry partners to improve the way radio is showing up in Mix Models that we’re excited about. In all of these efforts, we are partnering with the buy-side, sell-side and research committees to conceive, evaluate and implement innovation for the industry.
At times of change like we’re in right now, it’s always wise to go the source. Thanks to Rich Tunkel for taking the time. You can leave questions in the “Comments” below or connect with Nielsen directly at the email address listed above. – FJ
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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Outstanding insughts. Added sensativity for tracking radio listening is excellent. Thank you Rich and Fred. BTW, basball pitch clock good; football kick off bad.
Do users actually plug their headphones or earbuds into a toggle and then into their device? Can you share the actual questions you use in your consumer survey as well as both the actual answers and then how you then adjust the metric? Would love more transparency on this important adjustment..
Hi Marshall,
The PPM device does not have means to measure headphone listening directly. That is why we employ the adjustment survey to include this additional listening. The actual survey collects answers about all audio listening including AM/FM, Internet Radio, Satellite Radio, Music streaming services, Podcasts or owned music library. Respondents check off how they listened (Car radio, Stereo or boombox, AM/FM radio headset, Small personal radio, phone or tablet, Laptop or desktop computer, Smartspeaker or other). We also ask them if they used Headphones to listen (Yes/no) and how long. These results provide us with a factor (essentially the proportion of the relevant audio that is consumed over headphones). That factor is included automatically in the final AQH reported for the stream of each radio station. If you have additional questions, you can also send an inquiry to [email protected]
Rich,
What’s up with the plan to measure listening via an app on a smartphone?
The 3 minute change is a disservice to embedded markets in the shadow of higher power major market stations in the core (like New York City). Here we still suffer with antiqued Diary methodology, with its 5 minute reporting rule based on recall vs. electronic gathering of data with it now shorter 3 minute rule for quarter hour credit and cume. If the PPM change achieves its goal of increased cume and quater hour listenership, the disparity will only create a greater gulf between the two methods of measurement at the expense of embedded market subscribers. There is no reason for two overlapping methods of measurement in the same market. All reporting stations within a “market” should share the same methodology and currency.