After 15 years of metered radio-ratings measurement, the early clichés of programming in a PPM world have become less noticeable. Our radio-station sweepers aren’t always two seconds. We’re not hearing appointment setting for everything. (The most extreme example was the jock teaser for a bit in four minutes that was actually a teaser for you to read the full story on the station website.) There are even some radio programmers doing stopsets in some combination of clock times other than :00/:30 or :15/:45.
It became clear very quickly that the early rules of PPM were not silver bullets. It took a while for broadcasters to move away from PPM dogma. PPM took hold just as Pandora was emerging as radio’s most serious competitor. But it’s taken inroads by the streaming services for broadcasters to see personality, particularly outside morning drive, as a super-power, not a vulnerability. I also think that PPM took hold at a time when there was more of an open dialogue between broadcasters in the radio trades and at industry conferences. As radio looked for new tactics, there were fewer places to discuss them.
That’s why one of the most important panels at Radiodays North America, to be held in Toronto on June 8-9, will be Navigating PPM: What We’ve Learned, moderated by Stingray’s Steve Parsons and Edison Research’s Larry Rosin. They will be joined by consultant Angela Perelli, Audacy’s Chris Ebbott, Rogers’s Christian Hall, iHeart’s Sarah Cummings, and Coleman Insight’s Warren Kurtzman.
When you talk to programmers about PPM now, some will tell you they are less focused on trying to game the system and more on just doing what’s right for their radio station. The biggest turnaround has been in the attitude towards personality. Even in 2009, a moment when content had been minimized, there were exemptions granted for, say, Ryan Seacrest. Howard Stern was already gone from broadcast radio, but it was widely held that he would have performed well in PPM. But high-profile Adult R&B radio hosts such as Michael Baisden didn’t get the same benefit of the doubt.
Eventually, however, we realized that personality and storytelling were difference-makers. “Being good at the conventional will lead to ‘meh’ ratings, but being really good at the stuff we always tried to steer our jocks away from will lead to blockbuster ratings,” says Parsons. He points to the 2-3 minute editorials by CHBM (Boom 97.3) Toronto morning host Stu Jeffries or the bond that CKIS (Kiss 92.5) Toronto’s Roz & Mocha have built with their audience. “PPM rewards the unconventional done well.”
But PPM still casts a shadow in other ways. Contesting was sometimes tactical (“listen to win”) but sometimes for image (“show us your call letters”). Now, Parsons notes that it is almost entirely the former. At least Boom 97.3’s Payroll Payout has entertainment value for those not playing. It’s hard to say the same about all the hourly national text-to-win contests that rarely have a local payoff, and are not the magic bullet in the way that radio’s 1980s “listen for your birthday” game once was.
There are other places where PPM casts a shadow. The RDNA panel will talk about the execution of metered measurement, these thoughts are more about how broadcasters have responded to it:
I’m still hearing call letters less. Even at the height of PPM dogma, there were warnings that even without the need for diary recall, it was still important to build brand. I hear call letters and station names inconsistently now, even on some big-market radio stations. What I hear doesn’t sound like a deliberate attempt to throw off the yoke of call-letter repetition; it sounds more like sloppy voice-tracking or content repurposed among many markets.
We are still programming to the nine-minute listening occasion that PPM exposed. Is that savvy? Or self-fulfilling prophecy? During PPM, it was possible to see some stations win by taking a traditional approach to Time Spent Listening — more variety within one listening span — than the “play a smash hit now, and hope for an extra occasion” approach that had taken hold.
We are still trying to rebuild R&B/Hip-Hop and Latin radio. The industry accepted the ratings declines of those formats too readily, and dismantled the personality franchise (especially in afternoon) too quickly. Eventually what we often saw was an Adult R&B station and one Spanish-language broadcaster in a market rebound while others continued to struggle. We’re seeing broadcasters embrace personality at R&B radio again, but I’m also seeing Amazon’s listener-driven AMP get its first inroads as a broadcast radio alternative with Hip-Hop and R&B, judging from the number of offerings in those genres.
We feel less in control of our own programming destinies. Talk to a radio friend in another market about an up or down month and the discussion isn’t about a TV advertising buy or a change in a programming philosophy; it’s about that one heavy user who came or went. For a while, it was about the processing of the meter itself. The last decade has rendered broadcasters less able to do the things they need to do to promote or staff their radio stations anyway. But sometimes it seems we have become existential about them.
We are leaving real issues unaddressed. The issue that broadcasters have become most existential about is spotload. Having a three-hour commercial-free workday kickoff may be the best way to get a bigger piece of existing listening, but it doesn’t address overall listening levels. It also doesn’t fix the streaming stopset experience — an issue since before PPM was currency. The debate over AM radio this week — regardless of Ford’s decision not to eliminate it this year — should have us focused on improving our user-experience issues.
We need the people who can rebuild radio’s personality and entertainment franchises. Because we decided that companionship and show-biz weren’t important, we spent 15 years without training anybody to do that sort of radio. The generations of broadcasters before them have in many cases retired, been consolidated out of the business, or at least shamed away from doing the sort of radio that seemed old-school. Radio needs innovators now, but it also needs all the people already in our midst using the best of the skillsets they have.
For the full Radiodays North America schedule, click here.
