oldies76 said:
When CBS-FM has huge specials (not your average weekly specials, but the significant ones), which occur several times a year (1001 countdowns, A to Z's, and the likes....) I believe listenership is higher than you state, only due to listener feedback online and on the air.
Advertisers don't see daily or weekly data, they see books. And, even in PPM they tend to average several books for consistency and to eliminate wobble and such.
More important, advertisers tend to look at 6 AM-Midnight M-F first, then specific M-F dayparts. Then, maybe, they look at daytime on Weekends. They seldom look at nights, and even less do they look at weekend nights.
The numbers I am referring to for weekend evenings are pretty consistent... on a market and station basis over time. But when we look at specific dates, as we can in the station software, weekend evenings wobble all over for everyone... because a top station might only be registered by 6 or 7 dials inside the sales demos. You can't form conclusions on data that has a wide range within the margin of error that a 90% confidence level would produce.
If such few people really tuned in, as you say, then these specials would not air as frequently.
While I can not climb inside the mind of another station's PD, I can tell you that weekend and holiday specials are used to relieve the monotony inherent in music formats and to create an illusion of variety, expectation, etc. It gives a station something to talk about and to sound excited about.
If it were about ratings, most stations would sign off at 11 PM weekdays and 7 PM on weekends.
Every weekend on WCBS, is featured with a Hall of Fame special, which are quite popular.
They are apparently well accepted by the station's regular listeners, as evidenced by the fact that they don't go down when they do them and they continue to use the device to give dimension to the station... sound programming practices from a station that obviously knows what it is doing and how to keep listeners engaged.
Yeah, the ratings may be lower on some weekends, but many, many people still listen to them. It's called weekend recreational listening, whether in a car or at home. And this would apply more to the upper end of the 25-54's.
All music format listening is "recreational." However, I have never ever heard the term "recreational listening" used.
Since the engaged listening to CBS FM is almost all at the upper end of 25-54, and almost all in the lower end is accidental or forced, you don't make a compelling point here.
And the weekend evening listening level rating is about a 0.2. Given the margin of error, that means from below a 0.1 to about a 0.4 would all be accurate numbers based on number of meters, level of station detected listening and a lot of math.
