Re: One Newspaper's Tale on Arbitron

[DonKelley@aol.com]

Reaction to the Twin Cities article on Arbitron...it's only natural that management from WFMP-FM, a female-targeted station that only gets a 0.1 (or 0.8) in a tight demo like Women 18-49, would complain about Arbitron's methodology. Lousy ratings must be Arbitron's fault, right?  It certainly couldn't be a case of a station that might have medicore programming, poor marketing, and a distressed signal, could it?    
The writer, Brian Lambert, gets some of his facts right, but - like many reporters covering radio - doesn't get everything right.  As most people on this list know all too well, diarykeepers only have to work for one week to get their dollar.  Not three months.
Lambert takes a negative stance on the PPM without appearing to know much about it.  For one thing, it's not the "so-called" People Meter.  That's what Nielsen uses in Boston.  It's the Personal People Meter, and the numbers in Philadelphia clearly indicate that radio listenership goes up with the PPM.  This is primarily because people have much greater exposure to radio than they realize. It hears everything you hear.  TSL is a little off, but cume is much higher.  Midday ratings are bigger.  Nights and Weekends do better.  Niche formats (like female-talk WFMP-FM) do better with the PPM.  Full-service AM's like WCCO-AM have a softer - but still very strong - spike at 7AM, and do better in other dayparts.  The PPM works in kitchens and in cars - where WCCO-AM no doubt gets most of its quarter-hours. WCCO-AM, of course, would not be a "mall" radio station with either methodology, so the quote from their PD is meaningless. 
As flawed as the diary system is...it is very consistent.  The diarykeeper panel is zero-based every week, 48 weeks a year. In Boston there are about 4500 in-tabs per book.  That's around 375 different people every week.  And what happens?  With minimal shuffling for position, the top five stations are the same book after book. 
Psychographic data, by the way, is available from Scarborough.