Commercials Commercial Commercials

[Santa fe]

This thread brings to mind a comment made to me many years ago by one of my first bosses and beloved mentors in this business. As his OM we were discussing various music formats when he said, "I really don't care what kind of music we play. The music is just something to fill time between commercials." While he said this with a wry smile, he wasn't being cynical or sarcastic but teaching me a basic truth. It is called commercial radio, and it's purpose is to make money selling commercial time to clients. It was a lesson that has stayed with me. Perhaps there was a time when stations could meet their needs playing fewer or different kinds of commercials but while times change and the industry has changed the goal remains the same. Now, as then, audience response to the commercials is a still a prime arbiter of success. How that is achieved, format, content, presentation, positioning, is the other aspect of this business.

 

[TheBigA]

"I really don't care what kind of music we play. The music is just something to fill time between commercials."

As I often say, we're not in the free music distribution business. If you only want music, there are services you can subscribe to. We don't require a subscription. How you handle the breaks is up to you. But the commercials HAVE to air because the advertisers have a contract. What we know about today's radio audiences is that they use both broadcast and streaming. It's not one or the other, especially in CHR. The music business knows this as well. It's not like the 60s when radio was the only way people heard music.

 

[gr8oldies]

As I often say, we're not in the free music distribution business. If you only want music, there are services you can subscribe to. We don't require a subscription. How you handle the breaks is up to you. But the commercials HAVE to air because the advertisers have a contract. What we know about today's radio audiences is that they use both broadcast and streaming. It's not one or the other, especially in CHR. The music business knows this as well. It's not like the 60s when radio was the only way people heard music.

There was one of the bigwigs at Clear Channel who said something along the lines of "We're not in the news buusiness, we're not in the music business, we're in the business of delivering an audience to advertisers". Everyone in the business (and on boards like this) was OUTRAGED! But it was the truth.

 

[K.M. Richards]

There was one of the bigwigs at Clear Channel who said something along the lines of "We're not in the news buusiness, we're not in the music business, we're in the business of delivering an audience to advertisers". Everyone in the business (and on boards like this) was OUTRAGED! But it was the truth.

Here is how I explain it to people, who upon discovering that I am a radio consultant/programmer, take me to task for the "limited playlists" and then try to convince me that they know they are right because "the customer is always right".

Me: Yes, but you're not my customer.
Clueless Person: What? Of course I am!
Me: No, the radio station is my customer. They pay me, not you.
CP: But then, by extension, I am their customer so I am still right ...
Me: No, because my job is to get them as high a number of listeners as possible in the age group that their advertisers want to reach, and that means playing pretty much only the songs that the majority of listeners agree on.
CP: See? That means you have to give us -- the customers -- what we want!
Me: No, it means that what you apparently want is for me to ignore what the rest want ... and you're still not the "customer".
CP: Well, then who is the customer?
Me: The advertisers. They are the ones paying for the spots to run, which allows the stations to pay their bills. Including me.
CP: So then what am I? Chopped liver?
Me: Not quite. Remember when I said my job is to get the most listeners? Well, the radio station then goes out and sells advertising to the local businesses based on how big our audience is.
CP: I don't get it.
Me: You are the product we sell, not the customer.
CP: SINCE WHEN??!!??
Me: Since long before you and I were born.

They don't like it, but it shuts them up most of the time.

 

[Kent]

There was one of the bigwigs at Clear Channel who said something along the lines of "We're not in the news buusiness, we're not in the music business, we're in the business of delivering an audience to advertisers". Everyone in the business (and on boards like this) was OUTRAGED! But it was the truth.

What Mays did was said the quiet part out loud. While some of us may have found that frustrating, I don't think anyone who has spent any time working in the business doubts that broadcasting is a sales and marketing operation. I've worked for some operators who were more about programming than others, but even the ones who were "all about programming" weren't investing in creating great sounding adult standards and classical stations. They were only investing in programming they could sell and believed they could make more money by providing a better and more polished product for the sales team.

When you don't pay for the product, YOU are the product. That has always been true and probably always will be.

 

[radiofollower]

Look, no one is disputing the need for commercial radio to run spots in order to hit their revenue targets. I am only disputing the current trend to dump 10 minutes of spots -- or more -- all in a row instead of spreading them out over the hour. In the old days, when I heard a spot break, I stayed with the station because I knew that it would be over in just a few minutes. Now, when I hear a spot break, I know that it will probably go on forever, so I change the station. On a side note, do the advertisers really think that the majority of the audience is actually still listening by the time they get to the 8th or 9th spot in a 12 minute spot break?

 

[skiwest]

^ Exactly. I do the same. I have lots of presets so I eventually find a station that isn't airing commercials.

 

[TheBigA]

I am only disputing the current trend to dump 10 minutes of spots -- or more -- all in a row instead of spreading them out over the hour.

It isn't a current trend. It's the way commercials have been done for 50 years. It began when radio stations started to segue songs together in groups in the 1960s and 70s. They found listeners liked to hear songs in groups. That meant they also had to group the commercials. The current system of 2 breaks an hour came about 15 years ago, after the advent of PPM. Prior to that, the average was 3 breaks an hour. That goes back to the 80s. There have been numerous studies done on the subject, and what they show is the length of the breaks don't matter. If a listener is prone to tune away, he'll do so at the first commercial. Spreading out commercials over the hour means playing them in between every song. That means more interruptions, and more opportunities for people to tune away. There really isn't a better way to do this. They all come with negatives. People don't like commercials, and the only alternative is subscription-based radio.

I've looked at the format at WAKS and they don't run the same number of commercials every hour. There are some hours with more than others. If you want fewer commercials, listen after 7PM.

 

[K.M. Richards]

I am only disputing the current trend to dump 10 minutes of spots -- or more -- all in a row instead of spreading them out over the hour.

This actually started to get traction in the major markets as PPM replaced diaries. Before, we used to schedule the stopsets roughly five minutes past the quarter-hour marks (I still do, because I program in diary-based markets) because if a diarykeeper logged you in a listening period that started in one quarter and ended in another you got listening credit for both. This comes into play with the average quarter hour (AQH) numbers which are very important in ad sales.

Under PPM, some stations started to "game" the system because AQH became secondary to time spent listening (TSL) as the meter was very specific as to what it "heard" and the precise start/stop times of those segments. So longer music sweeps became a way to increase TSL ... and the commercials had to go somewhere so they ended up in long blocks, often only a few songs apart. And as one station implemented this strategy, their competitors did the same thing under the philosophy of "if we're all in commercials at the same time, the listeners will quickly realize there's no advantage to switching away and just stay here through the break". Of course, that strategy has become more worthless as the audience finds other sources that were not as prevalent then.

But that strategy still protects stations from each other, and no one wants to be the first to back off from it as a result.

Under the diary, listeners such as yourself would not only sit through shorter, more frequent breaks, you would log that entire time as active listening. PPM is not as forgiving.

Historical note: The PPM was first developed by Arbitron and began beta testing in 1992 ... more than 20 years before they were acquired by Nielsen.

 

[K.M. Richards]

^ Exactly. I do the same. I have lots of presets so I eventually find a station that isn't airing commercials.

Read what BigA and I wrote right below your post. The odds of finding that station are very slim because everyone is playing "follow the leader" in terms of the stopsets being at the same approximate clock times.

It is entirely possible that by the time you have gone through your presets some of the stations finished their breaks and that is why you finally find one that is back into music. I'd be more interested to know how many presets you need to "get around" the scheduling and how long it takes you to go through them all.

 

[TheBigA]

Under the diary, listeners such as yourself would not only sit through shorter, more frequent breaks, you would log that entire time as active listening. PPM is not as forgiving.

Actually we don't know for sure if people would sit through the breaks then, because the diary wasn't minute by minute, as the PPM is. So people would just report listening in bulk. Once we could see actual behavior, it was very different from what they were reporting in the diaries. That's what led to a lot of changes, and even killed off some formats. People say they do one thing, and actually do another. We can see that in the PPM. So can the advertisers. That's why I say the advertisers know what they're buying. Everything is out in the open. No secrets.

The amazing thing is that there actually are more commercials in news & talk formats than in music. For some reason, no one ever complains about the commercials in those formats, and they're grouped together in the same way for the same reason.

 

[K.M. Richards]

Actually we don't know for sure if people would sit through the breaks then, because the diary wasn't minute by minute, as the PPM is. So people would just report listening in bulk.

That was the point I was trying to make, A. Thanks for the additional clarifying verbiage.

 

[K.M. Richards]

The amazing thing is that there actually are more commercials in news & talk formats than in music. For some reason, no one ever complains about the commercials in those formats, and they're grouped together in the same way for the same reason.

That's a point I had not given much thought to, and I suspect it is because the vast majority of the commercials are also heavy on the verbiage and lighter on the production. The audience for News/Talk may find those longer stopsets less objectionable as a result.

It's true ... all of the threads complaining about spot load and placement involve music listeners, not spoken word. I think it's possible that part of the discomfort/objection comes from that disparity between program content and commercial content.

 

[TheBigA]

^ Exactly. I do the same. I have lots of presets so I eventually find a station that isn't airing commercials.

Sitting through commercials is completely optional. There is no requirement that you must listen to a certain number of commercials in order to listen to the radio. Unlike podcasting, where typically there's a pre-roll that you must sit through in order to get to the podcast. I fly a lot, so I'm in airports where there is free wifi. In order to access the free wifi, you must sit through a commercial. No such requirement for radio.

That's the thing about radio. It's totally voluntary. We don't ask for personal information, we don't require a password, and you don't pay in advance. You either listen or you don't. It's all up to you.

 

[TheBigA]

It's true ... all of the threads complaining about spot load and placement involve music listeners, not spoken word. I think it's possible that part of the discomfort/objection comes from that disparity between program content and commercial content.

I used to bring that up in sales meetings. We should be advertising concert tours or music services, products that relate to our programming. When I'd take that idea to concert promoters, they told me they have more direct ways of advertising, such as going directly to an artist fan base, or having the artist do an interview, which gets them free advertising. We do some of that, but advertisers vary their approach so it's not all done using the same method. If they miss a listener on a music station (because the listener tuned away) they get them on another station, or using direct mail. When we do concert advertising, some ends up as co-op, where we give them spots in exchange for ticket giveaways or other promotion.

 

[K.M. Richards]

I used to bring that up in sales meetings. We should be advertising concert tours or music services, products that relate to our programming. When I'd take that idea to concert promoters, they told me they have more direct ways of advertising, such as going directly to an artist fan base, or having the artist do an interview, which gets them free advertising.

I imagine that your thought process and response to that is similar to my own. The fan base is always going to be the guaranteed ticket buyers; we're the means to reach the people who would be interested in the concert but not part of that base.

And artist interviews do help ... but only with those who happen to be listening when it airs.

Sounds like either excuse-making for not buying radio ... or a lack of complete thought process on the promoters' collective parts.

 

[radiofollower]

It isn't a current trend. It's the way commercials have been done for 50 years. It began when radio stations started to segue songs together in groups in the 1960s and 70s. They found listeners liked to hear songs in groups. That meant they also had to group the commercials. The current system of 2 breaks an hour came about 15 years ago, after the advent of PPM. Prior to that, the average was 3 breaks an hour. That goes back to the 80s. There have been numerous studies done on the subject, and what they show is the length of the breaks don't matter. If a listener is prone to tune away, he'll do so at the first commercial. Spreading out commercials over the hour means playing them in between every song. That means more interruptions, and more opportunities for people to tune away. There really isn't a better way to do this. They all come with negatives. People don't like commercials, and the only alternative is subscription-based radio.

I've looked at the format at WAKS and they don't run the same number of commercials every hour. There are some hours with more than others. If you want fewer commercials, listen after 7PM.

"Spreading out commercials over the hour means playing them in between every song". Not true. When stations used to have three or four spot breaks an hour, it was NOT between every song.

 

[TheBigA]

"Spreading out commercials over the hour means playing them in between every song". Not true. When stations used to have three or four spot breaks an hour, it was NOT between every song.

I addressed that in my post. Two breaks came about because of PPM. But if you want three breaks an hour, it's not much of a change. Instead of ten spots, you have seven in a break. Happy? Some stations still do the three and four breaks an hour. I'm sure if you look around, you'll find a few. If you listen to WAKS after 7PM, there are 6 minutes of spots per break.

 

[K.M. Richards]

"Spreading out commercials over the hour means playing them in between every song". Not true. When stations used to have three or four spot breaks an hour, it was NOT between every song.

I think you took him too literally instead of reading what he wrote as an exaggeration, not meant to be taken precisely as written.

Pretty much the same as when anyone says "every other minute" to describe annoyances when in fact those aren't actually happening 30 times in an hour.

However, he's correct that if a station with two stopsets of ten spots each were to go to three stopsets, those same 20 spots would still have to be divvied up and you'd have six or seven spots per. Is that going to be less aggravating to you ... or will it be more?

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

i worked at a station in the sandhills of nebraska that ran 5 commercial breaks an hour but they were never more then 2 minutes.. some were only 60 seconds.