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A Guide To Interpreting Media Data For Advertising
If the responsibility for determining where and when advertising should be placed on a radio station to best promote your company’s products and services is yours, there are certain things you need to look out for. A hot topic for managers attending management courses is spending the advertising budget effectively. Advertising on radio is still an effective way of promoting however being aware of how to interpret the numbers when examining a radio station's media data is crucial. Radio stations that are successful will have high values for the following categories: regular listeners, previous day's audience, and station's rating. This article shows what you ought to be looking for in these survey results, what analyses you should ask for and what can be read between the lines.
Stations that want to sell advertising time will usually publish their media data. The results of listener surveys for media analysis are generally accepted as the European standard. The three important figures relating to data about the station’s audience are:
Category A known as the total audience, and relates to those who listened to the station in the last 2 weeks.
Category B the number of people who tuned in to the previous day’s broadcasting .
Category C data the number of regular listeners, is those who tuned in on at least four out of seven days of the week.
Category D is an overall measure of popularity.
Having a high value for category A is no indication of a station’s success. This figure often conceals the occasional listeners who are hopping between stations or former regular listeners who are tuning in to their former favourite station for a change.
A measure of a successful station is to have high figures for the number of listeners for the previous day, for regular listeners and for the most popular station.
In order to find out if a radio station has declining listening figures ask for comparative data from earlier studies: constant values for category A and decreasing figures for category B, category C and category D (popularity rating) are characteristics. Since the media data is already a few weeks old, this trend could have intensified.
The more popular the station, the longer it remains switched on (resulting in a high net hourly coverage). As a rule, this value also decides the price per second. Evaluate the stations in your region and do not be satisfied if you find equal scores for Category B. Ask for the net hourly rating, in which duration of listening is a factor. Request charts that show each separate hour of broadcasting, including the average coverage, over the course of the day. It important to analyse the data as taught in good management courses.
If there are several equally competitive stations to choose between, get an idea of the relative success of each station at different times of the day by adding together the stations’ hourly coverage and work out the percentage share for each station.
The most advantageous placement of your advertising also depends on the type of listener. Ask for this kind of analysis to be broken down by age group, educational level and sex. If a programme succeeds in reaching two thirds of all women listening to the radio, but is broadcast at a time of day when three-quarters of all listeners are men, this programme is losing out on coverage. However, if your advertising is aimed primarily at women, this programme may - at relatively favourable prices per second - be just the place where you should advertise.
It is important to ask for the analysis that covers the activities of the entire broadcasting day, especially the listener’s activity at the time - if possible accurate to within 15 minutes. In this way optimum placement for your advertising can be achieved. There are various sales, marketing and management courses, which can also help you to develop a good understanding of effective marketing.
