Fresh data changes radio’s numbers game

There was punk aplenty at Saturday’s opening show of KROQ-FM’s two-night Almost Acoustic Christmas bill at Gibson Amphitheatre. The lineup was dominated by the 200 mph music, from headliner the Offspring down through Chicago’s Rise Against and Southern California’s own AFI and Slightly Stoopid. Even Stone Temple Pilots, with singer Scott Weiland back in the fold after his vitriolic breakup earlier this year with Velvet Revolver, and hard rock band Staind, though neither is classically punk, played brash, loud and snotty enough to fit right in.

Punk’s smash-the-rule-book ethos has manifested itself in KROQ’s program lineup in recent weeks with program director Kevin Weatherly’s decision to hack off a chunk of the “Kevin and Bean” morning show and toss them into the afternoon for an hour each day at 5 p.m. The move is a gamble, one that has ticked off some listeners and confused others, but it’s an attempt to respond to the ratings-tracking revolution underway in the radio industry.

“ ‘Kevin and Bean’ is our most popular show,” Weatherly said. “Now we’re finding we have as many listeners at 5 in the afternoon as we do at 7 in the morning, but we were seeing [the ratings] start to fall off some at 9 a.m. . . . This is introducing them to a whole new audience at the end of the day. A lot of people never tune in the morning, and now they’re asking, ‘Who are these guys?’ ”

The shake-up in the KROQ program lineup can be traced to the arrival in Los Angeles of Arbitron’s Portable People Meter method of measuring radio listenership. PPM has been rolled out in 10 markets across the country, including Los Angeles as of August, presenting the potential to bring as significant a change in the radio world as the 1991 arrival of SoundScan did within the record industry.

SoundScan replaced the reporting of record sales by store owners or employees with precise figures of products physically scanned at cash registers. PPM swaps the old diaries that selected listeners filled out manually with devices that detect and monitor radio signals in the cars, homes and workplaces of people who have been targeted by Arbitron to be statistically representative.

“It’s causing people to reevaluate everything,” Weatherly said, because PPM provides far more detailed, hour-by-hour tracking of a station’s audience, feedback that is delivered monthly instead of quarterly under the old diaries, which were only as accurate as the user’s memory.

“It used to be that you got a diary in the mail, and some people filled them out daily, others filled them out at the end of the [ratings] period just before they turned them back in,” said John Ivey, program director at KIIS-FM (102.7) and a Top 40 format director for Clear Channel Radio. “Some guy might have been working in a bank and listening to KOST-FM (103.5) all day because that’s what they played there, but he’d go home and report that he listened to KROQ because that’s his favorite station. The People Meter takes all the guesswork out.”

Arbitron launched PPM in March 2006. CBS Radio signed on two months later, agreeing to use it for its national network of stations, and Clear Channel Radio came aboard in March of last year.

Los Angeles radio stations started receiving PPM data in August.

In many cities, rock stations, including Top 40, modern rock and oldies formats, have performed better with PPM than with diaries, causing some low-rated stations to take a shot at bigger audiences by switching to rock.

Hispanic and urban stations, however, initially have fared less well under PPM, prompting New York Atty. Gen. Andrew Cuomo to file a lawsuit against Arbitron in October, claiming that PPM ratings misrepresent minority listenership.

Two key trends with PPM are that more people tune in radio than was previously indicated by the ratings diaries -- more than 90% of adults listen daily, compared with less than 50% who watch prime-time TV. But on average, they spend less time with the radio through the day than was previously believed.

“One of the most significant findings is that people only listen for 20 or 30 minutes at a blow,” Ivey said. “So the key is to get them back to listen as much as possible. If you’re a good radio programmer, that’s not news.”

But the PPM data could be a wake-up call at other stations.

“The People Meter is showing that if time spent listening is less than it’s ever been, then you better deliver -- you better deliver on personality, deliver on something that’s going to be better than the song I just heard,” said Jeff Pollack, one of the nation’s leading radio consultants.

One example at KROQ: “We’re looking at the length of our promos,” Weatherly said. “We want to see if we can say the same thing, get the irreverence across and capture the energy in a shorter amount of time. PPM is motivating people to clean up the unnecessary intrusions.”

Another idea from the trends is “appointment listening.” Some programmers are starting to think more like their counterparts at cable TV channels who offer popular programs at different times throughout the week to better accommodate viewers’ ability to tune in. KROQ’s shift of an hour of Kevin & Bean’s morning show to the 5 p.m. slot is a perfect example.

“Kevin and Bean have a terrific following,” Pollack said. “When you have a brand and a show that can compare to television and you put it on consistently at an appointed time, people will listen.”

Clear Channel is doing something similar with KIIS-FM morning show host Ryan Seacrest, who now has a syndicated show being picked up on about 100 stations nationwide. They’re using a nationally known personality to draw more listeners to subscriber stations at a specific hour each day.

Syndicating a popular personality isn’t new. But stations that use PPM rating data know more precisely now who is listening and when, which helps programmers pinpoint a station’s strengths and weaknesses.

At KROQ, Weatherly is waiting for a ratings verdict on the experiment with Kevin and Bean, which will come at the end of this month. But, he says, it’s important even with more sharply focused feedback not to overreact.

“You can’t start programming to the methodology,” he said. “You still have to program great radio, using compelling music and entertaining personalities.”

If anything, PPM is providing new energy to time-tested programming philosophies.

“I think we’ll see a lot of programming changes in the next couple of years, and I think it’s time for it, frankly. We need to reflect our highly mobile society,” Pollack said, adding, with the terseness of a good punk rocker: “Give it to me now, or I’m out.”

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randy.lewis@latimes.com