Moneyball: Ready? Spring Book’s Just Weeks Away

• The spring book starts in about five weeks as you’re likely to be reading this. If you’re planning a spring promotion you still have time to finalize contest plans and on-air promotional tactics – but time is getting tight if you’re planning to support your promotion with off-air paid advertising.

If you’re in a diary market, the additional awareness that can be built from people simply paying attention to your ad can be enough to remind them to write your station down when completing their diary. The additional awareness may be enough in PPM markets, but often you want listeners to take action: tune into your different station, listen at additional times of day, enter a contest, etc. For those cases, awareness is great, but you want more. In the wider world of B2C marketing, you want consumers to purchase a product, start using a service – at the very least you want them to go to a website or app to look more deeply into the thing being advertised.

Last week we showed the new metric we’ve developed, the “Marketing Funnel Conversion Index” (the marketing world loves the word funnel, though we admit it makes us think of funnel cakes). This new metric looks at the people who say they go on to take action as the result of an ad as a function of those who say they pay attention to ads on that platform. To make the numbers comparable across demographic breaks and across different constituencies, we express the number as an index against the mean for that demo or constituency.

Remember, the numbers below don’t take into account the likelihood of listeners being aware of ads on each channel (that’s a separate number). This index shows the likelihood of potential listeners taking action on ads noticed in each of 10 of the 21 channels we looked at in our study. We’re showing the numbers beyond the total 14-54 nationwide sample broken out by those most likely to participate in the ratings (RPS Yes) and then the subsets of those ratings-likely respondents broken up by generation. It’s not shown here, but we can get down to specific demos, ethnicities, format constituencies, etc.

You’ll notice that Facebook is pretty good at generating actions from ratings-inclined Gen Xers – but not among their Gen Z offspring. Snapchat isn’t so good at generating actions from ratings-inclined Gen Zs, but Instgram and TikTok work fine. As noted last week, the devil’s in the details – and we have lots of details.

When designing campaigns for marketing clients, this new metric gives our team a powerful tool to determine how much to lean on any given platform depending on demographics, the types of listeners targeted, and the goal of the campaign. Since the prices paid for inventory on different ad channels aren’t necessarily on a perfectly-level playing field, the Marketing Funnel Conversion Index allows us to pair the best available channels with the specific goals of the campaign.

Being able to make data-driven decisions about these campaigns, carefully managing the platform mix as we go, and placing as much digital media as we do, means we can do effective campaigns in the top ten markets, smaller markets ranked below 200, and everything in between. It’s the compound effect of using the data to do lots of little things better that can lead to dramatic results.

We’re skipping the webinar experience this year and offering to show deeper results from our new nationwide study, Ratings Prospects Study 23, to smaller groups by appointment. That avoids the problem of flying over data that someone is trying to get their arms around. With fewer people in attendance, we can answer questions on the fly. In the end, we think it’s better for everyone.

In 20 minutes, you’ll get six key takeaways that cover new ground for 2024 to help your radio station play and win the ratings game. We’re glad to review the data for individual stations or clusters, consultants, executives, etc. We’ll ask only 20 minutes for a sales-pitch-free Zoom, but we’re glad to spend as much time as needed to answer questions and talk about the data. An email to tellmemore@nuvoodoo.com will get you scheduled for a presentation of our latest data.