Arbitron

[Hilltopper James]

Any word on Salem dropping Arbitron?

 

[secondchoice]

If anybody could afford to drop Arbitron it would be Salem. I don’t know the percentages but The Fish seems to have a very large number of “local” commercials done in house that would make me believe they are dealing directly with the client not and agency. This might be the “future” of radio. LOCAL! I have always thought that the ad agencies should pay for the ratings services. As stated a couple of times on this board: the Stations pay for Arbitron which the Agencies use against the Stations trying to get flights below the rate card.

BTW welcome Nice post

 

[tcsnrayp]

No competitive commercial station with the chance of making money from agency (local, regional and/or national) buys can "afford" to drop Arbitron. You can't use it to sell with if you don't subscribe and most national buys are made strictly by CPP (cost per point) from the ARB.

 

[nuffsaid]

Guess its time for sellers to get back to selling radio the "old school" way! Stations have looked to the ad a gencies for revenue growth and it is true most are looking at CPP and it is a simple way to do business. They send out an avail and the stations that meet their CPP and "value added" get the business. We need to get back to pressing the flesh and seeing clients eye to eye in the street. There is local business out there and the sellers who are asking for that money are doing well. Sellers are falling into the same trap that jocks and programmers have in this computer age.

 

[RoddyFreeman]

No competitive commercial station with the chance of making money from agency (local, regional and/or national) buys can "afford" to drop Arbitron. You can't use it to sell with if you don't subscribe and most national buys are made strictly by CPP (cost per point) from the ARB.

You are exactly right. When you don't subscribe to Arbitron, your national rep is not allowed to sell off Arbitron. Of course, the agency buyers have the numbers, but you're putting yourself at quite a disadvantage when you can't point out things from the report.

 

[littlejohn]

Local direct sales are what seperates the sellers from the order takers. If you put a mob in the client's store, he got value for his dollar and he will keep buying your station. This will happen when the seller approaches a client appropriate to the station's audience. So, whether you need ARB or not depends on the amount of national business a station does, to a large degree. In that religious stations tend to have rather more loyal audiences than non-secular ones, they would have a better chance of survival without using ratings. Whether that's a viable choice in a market this size is debateable... but I'd love to see Epperson/Atsinger/et al give it a try and show success.
I notice when the Spanish speaking folks elsewhere dumped encoding, Arbitron promptly took them to court over it.