Research - Some may say that we got very 'research happy' in the 90s and the early years of the new century. Many stations and clusters had regular perceptual studies and music tests as a regular part of the budget with studies every hear.
Now with the PPM - Media Monitors racking up scoring for the music in many markets or stations in many non PPM markets just living off the airplay data in Mediabase or BDS. The recession also trimmed back many research budgets and this could be a year when we see research start to return to our brands and products.
PPM based 'research' is also focused on 'real time' data overlaying the minute by minute ratings with the music and content we suddenly had a picture of what was really going on. The first reaction to this instant CRT-X-Ray of the audience has been real defensive. Many have stripped the stations trying to stop tune out at any costs. Are we losing the foundations of our brands, killing local engagement, stifling personality, and becoming boring by stripping down? Are these the precise elements we need to make an impact with an audience filled up with media choices that just play songs? Are these moves doing way more longer term damage than good to our brands? It might be better to work more on raising the bar on personality, content, engagement, and entertainment and find a way to do it without wasting lots of time.
The news is obvious that any research is going to have to come back with new technology and taking advantage of all the ways our audience now communicates. Reaching for a random sample of numbers from the phone book isn't going to tell us anything about 'today's audience.' Most of them under 45 don't have land lines and many don't use their phones for talking at all. You need to reach them through their phone, tablets and laptops with studies that are quick, fun and sharp looking. We will also need to be able to use social media to gather sample and lure them.
The sample itself has also changed. The idea of a random sample has moved more to a managed panel of people in the PPM world and don't be surprised to see Nielsen/Arbitron move to more managed panel samples outside of the top 50 markets. A lot of Nielsen's work in other projects in radio, retail and other industries has moved more to managed panels - it's a lot less expensive.
We also have lots of opportunities for 'quick research' with our social media fan bases and listener databases. The key is developing an overall strategy and plan here - much of what we do is very random right now. It seems like we have lots of pieces of research all scattered around the desk - how we build a real strategy with the pieces is a real challenge to every programmer.
When you look at the key ingredients in today's brands it's all about knowing what the customer is consuming and trying to know what they want. Netflix gathers tons of data and categorizes every show to try and keep ahead of what the audience is looking for. Amazon breaks down every product on who bought it and then pulls out the meta-data and tries to forecast your next order. Really we don't have much 'meta-data' to work with. Or do we really have some data and some potential to gather data on our brands and music that we could build into a stronger strategy?
Metrics-Ratings: The last post on the year ahead for Nielsen/Arbitron in this blog really covers some of this territory. Still when you look ahead for 2014 the changes ahead for the Ratings will impact us all a lot. Really when you look at Arbitron it was often rather slow moving. It took decades to get out of the 'printed book' world and much of the 'software' to break out the numbers came from outside sources that Arbitron eventually bought. The sample struggled to reach younger audiences and it still clings to the antique pen and paper/recall data collection system with the diary for around 75% of the markets.
How will all this change as Nielsen gets more comfortable in the 'audio' world? Will we have stronger samples in all markets? Will they be more based on managed panels than random samples? Will we begin to move away from being the 25-54 and 35+ media with ratings that actually capture younger cells? Will we team up with Nielsen and start to do more custom breakouts of the data and quit leaning so much on 25-54 ranks? Will the diary finally be replaced with real time data gathering in other 75% of the markets?
There is a lot going on with the research and ratings fronts as we head into 2014. In many ways the real keys to our success in the future lies in learning a lot more about an audience that is evolving and changing at an ever increasing rate of speed. As our communication systems speed up so does the change they produce.
Clearly in 2014 we NEED to start building a lot more of a strategy and evolve our research. We've cut back on this area over the last 10 years and even before that our systems and research methods were antiquated in sample, data gathering, and we kept looking at the same data over and over.
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