Arbitron Poll Will Seek to Clarify Who’s Listening

Arbitron, the lone company devoted to measuring ratings for all Southland radio stations, plans this summer to run tests that might help remedy what one unhappy station manager terms “the Watergate” of the radio business.

The controversy is all about language, specifically Spanish, and whether knowing exactly what percentage of Southern California’s vast Latino population speaks only Spanish, only English or both is necessary for accurately determining the most popular radio outlets.

At present, no one--not Arbitron, not the stations, not the U.S. Census Bureau--knows the answer. None of them, according to a report issued recently by Arbitron’s Radio Advisory Council, knows what percentage of the area’s Latinos speak what language.

“It is totally irresponsible,” said Roy Laughlin, president and general manager of KIIS-AM/FM. “To have a statistically valid sample, you need to know what percentage of the city is predominantly Spanish-speaking.”

At present, Arbitron surveys the Latino population simply by sending listening diaries to Spanish-surnamed households. But given that Latinos whose primary language is Spanish are likely to listen to different stations than those whose primary language is English, Laughlin and other station managers believe that the ratings--and thus advertising revenues--can be influenced if one group is over-represented in the sampling.

Indeed, they argue that this may account for some of the big swings seen in the radio ratings over the last year. In the quarterly survey for last fall, for example, listenership for Spanish-language stations such as top-rated KLVE-FM (107.5) was up significantly over previous measurements and many English-language stations that attract English-speaking Latinos, such as KIIS-FM (102.7), KPWR-FM (105.9) and KROQ-FM (106.7), suffered. But in the winter, Spanish-language shares fell 15% and those same English stations went back up.

“That is a giant shift and I’m sure it is a result of how many or how few Spanish-only households participated in the survey,” Laughlin said. “[Arbitron] needs to put in benchmarks and controls so that they have a consistent level of Spanish speakers from survey to survey, just as they do for women and just as they do for African Americans.”

Laughlin and 12 other managers of local English-language stations raised the issue with Arbitron last December. Now the company has decided to act, although it doesn’t necessarily believe that its current measuring techniques--which try to mirror the general population in terms of age, gender, race and area of residence--are inaccurate. It just doesn’t know for certain.

“It’s a valid debate, a very important debate, and while some radio stations insist language weighting is essential, there are those on the other side who say that current methodology samples the language groups proportionately,” said Thomas Mocarsky, Arbitron’s vice president of communications.

And so this summer, Arbitron will be conducting tests in an effort to determine the language composition of the Latino audience here and in five other cities and whether those numbers correlate with the ratings.

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The test, which will be done parallel with Arbitron’s regular quarterly survey of audience listening habits but will not count in its official data, will ask Latino participants three questions: What language they speak at home, at work and which language they prefer. The language identified at least twice will be considered that person’s dominant one.

If the results prove useful, the earliest that Arbitron could change the way it measures the market would be sometime next year. If the tests prove inconclusive, Arbitron will continue collecting data without any language controls.

One radio consultant who did not want to be identified said that the controversy might even affect English-language stations that don’t have much of a Latino audience. If Arbitron relies too heavily on Spanish speakers for its data, causing those English-language stations with a following of English-speaking Latinos to fall, then those other English stations rise by comparison, simply by holding steady. Stations with older, mostly white audiences--such as KFI-AM (640), currently No. 3 in the market--and stations with large numbers of African American listeners--such as KKBT-FM (92.3), currently No. 4--fall into this category.

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The ramifications of which stations are most popular not only affects bragging rights but also economics. When ratings go up or down, so do the prices that advertisers are willing to pay for commercials. Laughlin would not specify how much ad revenue English-language stations lost after last fall’s Spanish-language surge, but one radio consultant put it at more than $8 million.

Laughlin said that, in the wake of the most recent ratings, advertiser billings at his and many other English stations have rebounded.

“We love the Hispanic audience,” Laughlin said. “Perhaps as much as 40% of our audience is Hispanic. But we believe that there are three Spanish markets in this city: Those who don’t speak English, those who are bilingual, and those who speak only English. All we want is to have all three markets fairly represented in every [ratings] book by age and by sex.”