NewsLine Column: Bridging The Radio Ratings Rift

Radio audience measurement body RAJAR recently launched a major consultation seeking the views of advertisers on how it should proceed with the introduction of an electronic measurement system. As calls to find a suitable replacement for the current diary method mount, RAJAR’s managing director, Sally de la Bedoyere, explains the complexities of introducing a new trading currency…

RAJAR’s consultation process with advertisers and agencies is now officially underway. As you can imagine, many people already have strong views on how and what RAJAR should measure in the future. While there are a lot of fundamental decisions that will need to be taken, many of them will eventually come down to cost.

One of the first issues with an electronic system is to gain agreement on what we actually define as ‘listening’. The fact is that an electronic snooper will record thousands upon thousands of listening experiences as people go about their day in cabs or when the wearer passes a shop. And it will record an angry parent going to a child’s bedroom insisting that they turn their radio down!

Much of the accidental exposure is of a few minutes only, making little or no impact on listening hours. By including these one-offs in the station’s reach it may distort the station’s natural profile. The result is that contemporary music stations would see a rise in 45+ listeners, traditional male-oriented stations will seemingly attract female listeners, and so on. We must decide whether a person exposed to a station in arguably freak circumstances should be counted as a ‘listener’ to the station in question, and how many minutes of listening is the qualifying standard to be recorded.

An audiometer will measure listening among people not resident in a station’s survey area. In future, a station’s listeners could come from any part of the country, whether commuters or casual passers-through. This would also add to reach. But how do we express that reach? The original TSA (Total Survey Area) universe is no good since these people live outside the area, yet it is unlikely that any station would want to report its reach as a percentage of the total UK population.

Should agencies/planners/buyers just get used to dealing with ‘000’s, or would that confuse them? Should there be an inner and an outer TSA (since a large proportion of additional listeners undoubtedly come from within a limited radius of any existing TSA)?

How important is the location where the listening takes place? The diary provides this information with relative ease, but for meters to deliver this knowledge would certainly add to the costs.

So, how important is location of listening to us? If there were no location data, would it matter? How much detail do we require? Would in-home/out-of-home suffice? Would our knowing the approximate volume of out-of-home listening be enough, or do we need location-based ratings to sell airtime and/or plan campaigns?

How important is the measurement per platform? Do we need to differentiate between a station heard on FM, AM, LW, DAB, DTV, Freeview and Internet? It is already possible to listen to BBC radio programmes via the internet up to a week after they were first broadcast. Other stations may follow suit. New DAB sets are already beginning to feature pause/rewind facilities, allowing people to listen to any receivable digital programme outside transmission times. Should this audience be included in a station’s data or reported separately?

The current RAJAR service could report monthly, or even weekly, if the sample size was increased and there was sufficient money to pay for it. Would we like to see data appear more frequently, and if so, how frequently? Monthly, Weekly, Overnight? It all comes back to cost, again.

There is no escaping the fact that research using audiometers will certainly cost more than the current diary system, even given the tumbling costs of electronic components. Depending upon what the stations and the advertising community decide they need by way of reporting, even for something approaching the status quo of reporting times and data required, the total bill could easily escalate to £25m per annum – six times what RAJAR costs now.

With the answers to some of these questions, we can begin to fine tune how RAJAR develops, and then begin to address the thorny issue of who pays what.

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