Moneyball: Make Your Content Sizzle
• The spring book is underway. Even if you’re among the lucky ones who were able to get a music test completed earlier this year and have your marketing plans underway, you may still have concerns about your morning show or other key talent taking the coaching notes you’ve been giving them steadily. Research can help.
For years NuVoodoo has been executing content studies to help clients with talent, promos, and other imaging using an online version of the rheostat tests that used to be conducted in hotel meeting rooms and focus group facilities. In those settings, respondents were given handheld devices with a knob they could turn up or down to register their feelings about what they were hearing. These days respondents use a virtual slider on their smartphone screen or computer screen.
The data is clear cut and the results can be very useful in coaching (and making decisions about station imaging). We call it “The NuVoodoo Media Pulse Predictor.” A sample tracing of an actual morning show bit that ran just over a minute long is shown below. You can see the lines for this total sample of adults, along with blue lines for the men and red lines for the women. But the real magic is watching the lines trace out on the screen while listening to the audio. You see what connected more quickly for the women — and eventually drew in the men. You see where they react with pleasure or disinterest.
It’s an eye-opener for talent and always supports the efforts programmers and consultants have been making. It helps answer the question of whether your morning show has a pulse. It can help tune up the choices imaging folks make to sell your station to listeners. As one client put it, “It’ll make you better.”
A tracing from another Media Pulse Predictor Study shows an example of YouTube Syndrome. In the chart below you can see the reactions of a screened panel of in-demo station listeners hearing a benchmark morning show feature from that station running just over two minutes. The name of the feature tested well with their listeners in research — listeners even mention the feature unaided as a reason they enjoy the show. Yet the first minute of the segment doesn’t test well with listeners.
In the tracing above you can see the initial pop when the feature name is mentioned just a few seconds in, but the line then sags while the hosts performed the feature’s (too long) theme song. The line starts to head to greater enjoyment as the theme song comes to its end, near the end of the first minute of the segment. Once the game is underway, interest stays high for the remainder of the game and peaks as the winner is named at the end.
In the past year we’ve learned about a morning show where the star still carries the marquee value for the show, but the more recently added co-host is the captivating storyteller. For another client we found that on-air interactions with listeners got great audience reaction, while slice-of-life anecdotes from the host lagged. In another study we showed the flat spots in station promos and enabled their imaging director to reduce enough time across an hour to squeeze in another song.
We’re selling Media Pulse Predictor studies with 100 screened respondents and up to ten segments as long as two minutes (2:00) for $4800. We should probably be charging more, but we think this is a tool the radio business needs to be using more often. Need a bigger sample? Longer audio segments? Hit up me (leigh@nuvoodoo.com) or Carolyn (cg@nuvoodoo.com) and we’ll tailor something that fits your exact needs.
If it’s a last-minute music test that would help tune up your station or a tightly targeted digital marketing campaign to support your participation in a collective contest, NuVoodoo would love to help. An email to tellmemore@nuvoodoo.com will get quick attention from the right member of our team.
Additionally, NuVoodoo marketing guru Mike O’Connor is publishing important marketing insights from our latest general study, NuVoodoo Media and Marketing Study 25, twice every week at nuvoodoo.com/articles. — Leigh Jacobs
