Going to Zone Coverage
For more than 34 years, the Arbitron Co.’s survey of radio-station preferences has been based on the premise that all listeners are created equal. Now, however, it appears as if some listeners may be more equal than others.
When Arbitron’s fall ratings book is released Tuesday, for the first time ever its rankings for Los Angeles County will be based not on listener diaries gathered from the county as a whole, but on responses from five geographic zones throughout the area. Those results are then tabulated to produce countywide rankings, but only after the samples from each zone are weighted and balanced to assure they reflect the zone’s mix of age, gender and ethnicity as well as the correct proportion of the county’s overall population.
That means it’s almost certain some diaries will wind up counting more than others. For example, if 40% of the diaries Arbitron collects come from South-Central Los Angeles, they will be weighed less since that zone accounts for less than one-third of the county’s population over the age of 12. At the same time, diaries from other less-populous areas would be skewed upward.
It’s an imperfect system, admits analyst Allen Klein of Media Research Graphics in Encino. But he believes it’s a major improvement over the old one.
“It will allow Arbitron to produce better research,” he says. “It used to be that one diary had the same weight in Long Beach as it did in Beverly Hills. [But] if all the diaries come back from Long Beach or Southern L.A. County, you’re getting a distorted picture of the marketplace. If Long Beach is 10% of the marketplace and you’re getting 20% of the diaries back [from there], anybody that’s doing well in Long Beach has a shot at doing well” in the overall ratings.
Arbitron officials are quick to downplay the significance of the new system, saying that its diaries have always been distributed and weighted in a way to reflect the county’s overall demographic makeup. All the company is doing now, they say, is putting new controls in place to make sure its survey continues to reflect those splits.
“One thing is changing: Instead of sampling L.A. County as one big unit, we’re sampling it as five,” says Thomas F. Mocarsky, Arbitron’s vice president for communications.
Still, with advertising rates in the nation’s most lucrative radio market hinging largely on Arbitron’s survey, fortunes can literally rise and fall with those results. So station managers are monitoring the new format closely, though few expect it to produce any major changes.
“I think it’s more a help in clarifying where your [listeners] are. I don’t think it changes the numbers dramatically,” says Andy Mars, president of the Southern California Broadcasters Assn. and general manager for four Spanish-language radio stations in Los Angeles and Orange counties. “It’s probably too early to tell, but I don’t see it impacting programming.”
However, Roy Laughlin, the president and general manager of KIIS-FM (102.7), anticipates some surprises from past Arbitron surveys.
“I think it’s going to be significantly different,” he says. And Klein agrees, citing preliminary results from the first two months of the survey period.
“The first two phases . . . are so wild that we don’t know” what will happen, he says. “From one month to the other, KCBS-FM (93.1) lost a full share point. Spanish AM talk stations KKHJ-AM (930), KTNQ-AM (1020) and KWKW-AM (1330) lost half their audiences from one month to the other.”
Although Arbitron surveys 268 radio markets nationwide, Los Angeles County--which is paired with Orange County to form the metropolitan radio market--is the only one that will be divided by ZIP Codes for sampling purposes. And the reasons why are obvious: Its size and population are greater than those of some states.
“L.A. County was very unwieldy,” says an Arbitron spokeswoman. “The clients had come to us with this concern and we looked at how the clients used the area, how business was done. When you looked at L.A. County, you didn’t really get a sense of how the socioeconomic boundaries lay. But when you look at it broken up in the five pieces, the ratings within those five sections make a lot of sense.”
The idea certainly isn’t unique to Arbitron. Klein has been tracking listeners by geographic regions for years and those breakdowns have shown that big ratings don’t necessarily mean a deep market penetration. For example, the top three stations in the most recent Arbitron survey--urban music station KKBT-FM (92.3) and Spanish-language outlets KLVE-FM (107.5) and KSCA-FM (101.9)--all draw more than 40% of their listeners from just one zone, a zone that represents only 31% of the county’s overall population.
On the other hand, English-language music station KTWV-FM (94.7), with just half the overall audience of KLVE and KSCA, has a listener distribution that closely mirrors the market, making it a more attractive buy for advertisers seeking wide distribution.
But to Jeff Williams, director of research for KLVE and KSCA, emphasizing the fact that ethnic stations’ audiences are concentrated in particular neighborhoods is just the latest in a series of attempts by general-market stations to downplay the influence of Spanish-language radio.
“There’s a lot of ways to bend those numbers,” he says. “But in the first two months . . . of this new system, listening to Spanish stations is up. Up significantly. Either more people are listening to Spanish radio or this new system of Arbitron is getting more diaries back or weighting them in such a way that Spanish listening is being reported as going up.
“The bottom line is, the marketplace has changed over the past 20 years and some folks weren’t aware of it.”
Keeping Track: While no one expects Arbitron’s change in research techniques to have an immediate effect on programming, another new surveying system, Mobiltrak, has the potential to make a huge impact.
The system uses roadside scanners to monitor the radio frequencies to which passing cars are tuned. The technology, which was tested in Phoenix and Toronto before coming to Southern California last September, can produce hourly reports and its weekly sample size is more than 600,000. By comparison, Arbitron’s official ratings books take three months to compile and are typically based on less than 8,000 responses in a market of nearly 10 million people.
“It gives you immediacy,” Klein says. “It gives us a passive monitoring system. The listener has nothing to do with what’s recorded. They don’t return diaries. They don’t even know they’re being recorded. It is absolutely fascinating.”
But it, too, is imperfect. For starters, Mobiltrak’s monitors cannot receive AM signals and they reflect only in-car samples, ignoring home and workplace listening. And unlike Arbitron, Mobiltrak cannot provide demographic information nor track time spent listening. Yet its mammoth sample size and ability to track station preferences by the hour give station managers immediate feedback--information that could help determine whether a new format is working, whether a new song is worth adding to the playlist or whether certain on-air promotions actually draw more listeners.
