Moneyball: Nielsen Lowers the Bar … to Three Minutes
• It’s not unprecedented, but it is new and different: Nielsen is planning to drop the requirement of five minutes of listening in a clock quarter hour for a station to earn credit for a quarter hour and make the new requirement just three minutes of listening. This IS a first for this lower threshold in the metered methodology (the old RADAR report had the three-minute threshold before Arbitron bought it from SRI and subsequently updated the threshold to five minutes).
From what’s been reported so far, Nielsen has said that the lower threshold will goose AQH an average of 26%. That’s massive lift and would represent a win for radio. It will also show more people using the medium, which will be another win for radio. As many of us learned in college or early in our radio careers, the real job of the ratings is to generate revenue for stations: to get the meeting; to set rates; to book buys. Mark us as eager for this change. Mark us as eager for anything that helps this business of radio that we’ve loved so much and for so long.
Anticipating a lower threshold in spans that will qualify for Nielsen credit and the need to pay attention to listeners with even twitchier fingers ready to change stations, we thought it an apt time to review the top ten tune-outs for radio listeners, especially those most likely to be in the ratings sample. Among over 3,000 14-64s nationwide in NuVoodoo Ratings Prospects Study 24, nearly half say that too many bad songs caused them to tune out or change stations – and the number jumps to over 60% among the subset of the sample who profile as most likely to participate in the ratings (labeled “RPS Yes” in the table below).
Also shown in the table are generational splits of those most likely to participate in the ratings. Those 14-27 are labeled “RPS Gen Z.” The 28-43s are labeled “RPS Millennial” and the 44-64s are labeled “RPS Gen X+” (comprising the width of Gen X and the youngest five years of Baby Boomers). Commercial breaks don’t even crack the top half of the ranking for Gen Z and Gen X+. For the true digital natives, Gen Zs, the worst tune-outs are for talk about things that don’t interest me (though it’s not much lower for the older Gen X+ respondents). Surprisingly, it’s not the younger Gen Z respondents, but rather the older Gen X+ respondents who are most likely to tune out because hosts are being insulting or hurtful.
There will be a lot of extra quarter hours at stake and the need to get music schedules perfect shows up, with significant numbers complaining about bad songs, songs repeated multiple times in a few hours (vertical repetition), burned-out songs, songs repeated at the same time from one day to another (horizonal repetition), and songs that all sound the same. It wouldn’t be surprising if a second-order effect of this Nielsen change is having to spend even more time making music schedules exactly right for every quarter hour of every day.
If a bad surprise in the September monthly makes you rethink your fall book readiness, the NuVoodoo research and marketing teams are at the ready. Efficiently targeted digital marketing campaigns can be spun up in just over a week. Many library music tests can be turned around in less than 4 weeks. An email to tellmemore@nuvoodoo.com will get you the help you need.
