Commercial breaks

[Jacko]

I've noticed over the past several months that virtually every music radio station in the Boston area is taking its commerical breaks at about :15 and :45 past the hour. It's kind of hard to notice when you're flipping and all you get are commericals at those times. What is the reasoning behind this? I traveled to Rhode Island yesterday and noticed that WBRU and Cool 102 were doing the same thing. I'd imagine that it is not coincidence and it's something related to PPM, but still. Is there a benefit to every station taking commericial breaks at the same time?

Jacko

 

[SonicOverload]

commercial roadblock? I imagine each station hopes that if you know you'll only get commercials at that time on another station, you won't be likely to switch. That's my armchair radio fan guess, anyway.

 

[Laurence Glavin]

This is a common occurrence on the cable TV channels I watch. Most of the time I have MSNBC on, and during a commercial break check CNN and then maybe the Weather channel if it is offering ACTUAL WEATHER COVERAGE, not tornado aficionados in Oklahoma. It's usually the case that the other channels are in commercial mode, or are going in to commercial mode. Just this past week, I thought I'd then go to Comcast channel 540, Music Choice Classical. Bad move...they were just starting the Beethoven piano sonata number 12; it's one of LvB's quirkiest and least played pieces, so I hung around for its totality. Then went back to MSNBC, which was actually running a program. Yea.

 

[raccoonradio]

Some stations may counterprogram commercials with content. If RKO is running an ad break on Howie, perhaps WTKK would schedule Jay (and whomever)'s show to be NOT in an ad break, in case
people feel like pushing the button to see what else is on. Not sure if they're still doing it but for
awhile WTKK even had their shows (like McPhee, back when she was still on there) start at the top
of the hour--so if you didn't want to hear news headlines (like on RKO) you could punch the button
for 96.9 and voila, their show has already started.

Weather channel btw may have done a change recently in that they were showing one of their
programs about severe weather, etc., and the screen pulled back to show the current conditions,
forecast (even doing "hour by hour" like their website does), etc. In other words I think they were
not pre-empting their "local on the 8s"--or more to the point, they were showing it while not
interrupting their program.

 

[Oxford_Street_Shuffle]

Jacko, your PPM guess was right. PPM is the reason behind breaking near :15 and :45. (usually :13 and :43 if the station is doing it correctly)

The reasoning is this...

In diary markets, you get credit for keeping people as long as you can... so if you can sweep them over the quarter hours for more than 5 minutes, you get credit for both quarter hours and get an entire 30 minutes of listening.

In PPM, that's no longer the case... if someone listens from 8:05-8:15, the clock "resets" at :15. So you'd get credit for the 8:05-8:15 sweep, but the "timer" resets to :00 at quarter past. In PPM, you only need to keep someone for 5 minutes in a quarter hour to get credit - but still the longer, the better.

So if you can't get a lot of credit around the quarter hours 15, :30, :45, :00) then you might as well play spots there.