Radio is not appropriate for smaller local retailers in as dense a metro as NY is. They use local cable, various web options, etc. Even if you think of the Jersey only coverage, nobody is going to drive from the north end of the useful signal to the south end for a single shoe store or even a car or a sofa.
Agreed, but we are not taking about small local shops. There are plenty of large businesses in New Jersey that buy advertising and don't do a dimes worth of business in New York City or Philadelphia. Among them are banks, utilities, and some chain retailers. There are a number of large drive-in convenience store chains that have no place in urban areas, but a lot of outlets scattered throughout the suburban areas of NJ. They do advertise in local NJ radio markets where the can, but in areas where they can't reach the target audience efficiently with radio they channel their available dollars into local print and outdoor media instead. A NJ oriented station could pick up a lot of the ad dollars in those now inefficient geographical areas.
And then there are also NJ businesses that bite the bullet and pay to reach mostly listeners in NYC and Long Island who will never be their customers, but hope it is still worth paying NYC radio stations for the fraction of their audience in the advertisers business area, among them are the NJ car dealers who buy spots on NYC radio.
But advertisers big enough to buy across a state are agency accounts, and they buy individual markets. There is no advertiser demand for a Jersey station per se.... there is a demand for Philly market coverage, for NYC market coverage, and, to a much lesser extent for Trenton coverage, Atlantic City coverage and even, a little, for the embedded market coverage.
Radio is not bought by state or region, it is bought by market. There is no NE NJ market for ad buys. There is a New York MSA market.
Hopefully, ad agencies are sophisticated enough to understand market segmentation, and just as ad buys are made by age, or ethnicity, with computers it is just as easy to make buys based on "geographical" area within a market. A station that tries to do this may have to do the number crunching and selling of the concept but it is certainly doable. It would just be the same kind of market differentiation now done in print and on the Internet. Ad agencies making big print buys certainly have known forever the reasons for wanting to place ads in the "Newark Star Ledger," as opposed to the New York Daily News. Or in "New Jersey Monthly" magazine as opposed to New York Magazine. They could be convinced to make radio buys based on the same kinds of reasons.
While there currently is no NE New Jersey market for radio ad buys, that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be. Segmenting a market by political geography is no different from segmenting a market by ethnic or age group or any other category.
Over the years local radio stations have convinced Arbitron to provide data for local radio markets within the larger NYC market. Morristown, Monmouth-Ocean, Union-Middlesex-Somerset and Sussex are examples. The same could be done for NE New Jersey.
That could be done in the diary, too. Arbitron even has procedures for stations with overlapping coverage.
Although it could be done with diaries, PPM offers more certainty, less chance of confusion, and takes pressure off the broadcaster trying to make sure listeners get their diary entries correct. It's just a more workable system now than it has been in the past.
But... where is the need? Didn't 101.5 simulcast in Atlantic City, only to abandon that effort when the sales advantage was not there?
Yes, and NJ-101.5 did draw a South Jersey audience with that relay, but I don't think they bothered to network and sell the spots separately based on location. Just like North Jersey car dealers not wanting to pay for listeners on Long Island, they really don't want to pay to reach listeners in Atlantic City either.
As far as "the need" goes, from a listener perspective more news and information coverage targeted at New Jersey would certainly be attractive. You have to remember that NJ has no over-the-air commercial TV news coverage specifically targeted at the state, and in its mostly densely populated areas it doesn't have any specifically targeted radio coverage either. That makes it a unique situation in this country and therefore it offers opportunities for a unique fix. Maine, or California, nor any other state, don't need the same kind of fix because they have plenty of big in-state media to provide state and local news coverage. For whatever reason NJ was assigned radio and TV frequencies to provide that state and local coverage, but they have almost all moved across the rivers.
The need from an advertising perspective is for better potential customer targeting, more efficiency and less waste of ad dollars spent.
. But in a big metro, "local" means "market" and not every political jurisdiction needs a voice or has one, nor is there much interest in such information as opposed to the focus of, let's say, WINS or WCBS.
Posted on: Yesterday at 05:57:37 PM
You have to remember that WINS trends to targeting NYC listeners, and WCBS trends to targeting listeners in the suburbs.
As far as "political need" goes, citizens need to be fully informed about what is going on in their state or locality, unfortunately on New York or Philly media New Jersey news usually comes in second place or worse. That has been a citizen complaint in this market for decades.
New Jersey also has many demographic, ethnic and economic differences from NYC.
Subway riders buy far fewer new cars than suburbanites, apartment dwellers buy no swimming pools, but suburban homeowners do.
Some 40% of NYC residents were born in another country, but only 20% of New Jersey residents were.
Some 33% of New York City's population is described by the census as "non-Hispanic White" while in New Jersey that same description fits almost 60% and is much closer to the national average.
Only 33% of NYC residents own their own homes, while 66% of NJ residents do.
The median income in NYC is $50,000 and in NJ it is $70,000.
And the list could go on and on.
These kinds of differences are, and should be, of great importance to marketers and advertising buyers and they should have at least as much impact on the media buyers media choices as ethnicity or age group.
A station specifically targeted and delivering New Jersey residents could deliver potential customers with more average dollars to spend, and who are more likely to buy specific products, as well as provide efficiency to those advertisers who don't do business outside the state.
