• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Philadelphia PPM Ratings: October 2015

Up the road cbs-fm has advanced their music into the 80s and not lost any ratings. It seems that there is a backlash from letting go of their loved and adored personalities. They should have never let Ross go.

There is something to say for the market history though. z100 and plj in the 80s were consistently getting great adult numbers, both z100 and plj were #1 even 25-54 in the 80s with total domination of the teen and 18-34 numbers as well. Hot hits 98 CAU while an amazing radio station that no other Philly station has ever sounded as good as, just wasn't embraced in Philly like those NYC chr's were in their market. CAU had awesome teen numbers, but there were never even in the top 5 18-34. So it could be that the market doesn't have a love for the 80s music as they should be.

I think it is mostly that OGL sounds stale and dull, and that the beloved personalities are gone. Philly is a very weird market all its own for sure. Never embracing chr the way the rest of the country does, a very polarizing market where the extremes of rock and urban are embraced.
 
Ditto, DOB -- weird composition to Philadelphia, apparently.
Or is NYC the one that's out of step?
Like NYC up the Pike, Philly radio touches three states. The lighter AC's top the markets. Sports on FM. Both FM newsers failed. The two markets support two CHRs (although NYC supports one more). Each market has an Oldies/Classic Hits owned by CBS, plus a well-regarded CBS news presence.

So maybe David E. can determine any correlation between the CHR success and Spanish formatting. Philly has no Spanish station of note; New York has six that make the cut. I've lived in both cities and to me that's the only real difference I can detect (and again, only by using the ratings).

On another note:
We were in Horsham/Hatboro/Hilltown a week ago and our buddy had on what sounded like a classic rock station in the background. I guessed WMGK and was told, no, that's MMR. We were all running around packing and moving things, so I didn't hear much of the radio. (That was the day it poured like blazes for a half-hour straight with us on the road).

Well, I see that WMMR and their wonderful numbers is listed as 'AoR', not 'Rock'. Is that a Radio-Onlike goofup, or did WMMR make some changes? Perhaps they were always listed as AoR and I didn't catch it?
 
MMR jumps all the way to #2, while OGL slumps to #8. I don't think either of those positions have been seen in a while. Ben--BEN!--cracks the Top 10 (OK, tied for 10th). Q and Amp seem to keep moving in tandem rather than hurting each other. WRTI doubles its share in a month. (From a low point, but still...) Wackiest book in some time.
 
Steve Green NEPA said:
So maybe David E. can determine any correlation between the CHR success and Spanish formatting. Philly has no Spanish station of note; New York has six that make the cut. I've lived in both cities and to me that's the only real difference I can detect (and again, only by using the ratings).
Click to expand...

It's not the number of Spanish language stations that affects the market but the percentage of Hispanics and how they affect the contemporary music tastes in a market.

We are used to seeing the African American community affect pop music tastes in cities with large Black populations... the Motown effect. As percentages of Hispanics have grown in some markets, that group... particularly the subset that is English dominant... affects overall tastes. That is why WKTU does so well in NYC as one example.

Philadelphia has a very small Hispanic population, on the order of 8%. New York has about triple that. In one market, there is little influence, while in the other the influence is as great as that of the African American community.

Because CHR has appeal in the younger demos where second generation Hispanics are such a big part, that's where you feel the influence first.
 
Hartford is about 40% Hispanic (though the suburbs are mostly lily white) but has only a flea-powered translator and a couple of weak AMs serving that demo. Maybe there's more of a Hispanic middle class in NYC and there's not enough purchasing power in Hartford?
 
What a huge dip for WOGL. Really quite odd, and as deepstblu said- this sure is a weird report. Now I really do love BEN fm and am very happy to see it making the top 10! KYW is still going nice and strong, proving AM still is useful and listened to.

WIP still kicking WPEN out of the water. Is WPEN going to last much longer? I would not be shocked if within a year or so- unless those rating change, we could see talks of a format flip.

What did MMR do that bumped its ratings from a 5.2 to a 6.3? I have been a long time listener of WMMR and have noted that they've eased away from real heavy 90's+ to an almost classic rock format with a few modern heavy metal tunes thrown in. Plus their audio is just amazing, and easily recognizable.

Has anyone else noted the steady death of Q102? July 15 they were a nice 5.1. Skip to this one and they're a measly 3.8. I think there are a few factors that are playing in.. 1) PANDORA RADIO. 2) Youtube. 3) WBEB More FM

By the way- Christmas music season is fast approaching. Keep your eyes on the ratings to see what happens between the Christmas music stations. They are WBEB 101.1, WJBR 99.5, WOGL 98.1 and WDAS-AM 1480 does jazz christmas music in between regular smooth jazz tunes. Also watch happens to the stations that aren't playing Christmas music.
 
As many have written before .... the 6+ ratings don't mean much. They certainly don't tell the whole story about the listeners. That's why Nielsen gives the 6+ ratings away ..... they can't sell them to their subscribing stations.
 
frankberry said:
As many have written before .... the 6+ ratings don't mean much. They certainly don't tell the whole story about the listeners. That's why Nielsen gives the 6+ ratings away ..... they can't sell them to their subscribing stations.
Click to expand...

But 6+ DOES tell you how many listeners the station has, just not broken down by age, by gender, by income, by neighborhood or in any other way, right? Or is it possible that WOGL's drop does NOT signify a decline in total listeners? If it doesn't, what in the world DOES that 6+ number mean? Yes, I realize the number means zip to the station's brass, and I also realize that 55+ listeners are poison and stations would rather they not listen at all, so don't tell me all that again. Just tell me yes or no: Does a drop in the 6+ number mean fewer people (all kinds of people, ad-gullible or ad-resistant) are listening or not?
 
A decline in total listeners does not necessarily equal a decline in their target audience. It may indicate a downward trend .... or .... it may indicate nothing.
That is why the 6+ numbers have no value to the stations.
 
CTListener said:
But 6+ DOES tell you how many listeners the station has, just not broken down by age, by gender, by income, by neighborhood or in any other way, right? Or is it possible that WOGL's drop does NOT signify a decline in total listeners? If it doesn't, what in the world DOES that 6+ number mean? Yes, I realize the number means zip to the station's brass, and I also realize that 55+ listeners are poison and stations would rather they not listen at all, so don't tell me all that again. Just tell me yes or no: Does a drop in the 6+ number mean fewer people (all kinds of people, ad-gullible or ad-resistant) are listening or not?
Click to expand...

A drop in 6+ share does not necessarily mean a drop in listeners. Share is a percentage of people listening to the radio. But if total listening is up in a particular book, but your share declined you may still have the same number of AQH listeners. This is why agencies buy either AQH persons or ratings, not share.
 
Don't really think Ogl's decline is due to the air personalities departure, it's not like the old days of radio when you would tune in to hear a particular jock do his thing, today it's only about the music. Ogl's skews too old for a classic hits station they have to go mostly 80's/90's and leave Motown to the Geator LMAO.
 
I agree with you Hdradio. I think they play for too many of the same motown oldies by the Supremes and Four Tops. It is good music, but I just do not think it fits the target demo of classic hits. I think if the followed the model of WCAU-Hot Hits in the 80s (1981-1987)and Eagle 106 (1987-1993), this would be the perfect target demo.
 
98 Cau was always around 6th 18-34 in the 80s, where as z100 and plj were #1 and #2 in the 80s. There might not be as much passion for 80s hit music in Philly as in the 1980s the 933 was Mullet Rock Radio and the numbers were ridiculous. A rock station that was often #1 in the female demos back then. Also Power 99 did pretty well in the 80s too, not much from those two choices of 80s Philadelphians that would fit WOGL today.

Normally I wouldn't say what the market was in the 80s has much impact today, but Philly is just not one of those cities that new people are moving to. I think it is more of a factor than almost all other cities expect for the likes of Detroit Cleaveland etc.
 
It would be cool to get a splash of real 80s radio from these stations. I know you got to play the burnt to a crisp same 200 songs, the masses don't tire of them, but hey once an hour play a song that was a hit on CAU-fm, drop Sugar Walls!
 
Aside from all the departures, WOGL is doing okay.

I recall that several years ago, before Ben FM debuted, there was talk about WOGL flipping to a Jack FM type format. At the same time, CBS-FM ditched its oldies format and went to the Jack experiment(which failed miserably).
 
CurtisNEPA said:
. At the same time, CBS-FM ditched its oldies format and went to the Jack experiment(which failed miserably).
Click to expand...

That's an urban legend.

Jack, in the books just prior to switching to a classic hits format, had better 25-54 numbers than CBS-FM got as an oldies station in the period prior to becoming Jack.

The reason why CBS changed from Jack to a new format (not the "old" oldies format) was contained in the data coming out of the Philadelphia PPM test in the 2002-2004 period. WOGL was doing better in PPM than in the diary, and those of us who were in the group of national programmers who got the early data disks could see that CBS was tweaking the format... moving a bit more contemporary and seeing diary and PPM results improving.

CBS executives saw that classic hits might be one of the outperformers in PPM. They also knew that smart programmers at the other broadcast companies could see the same data. To prevent a "good" PPM format from being taken by a competitor, CBS relaunched as classic hits and when the PPM rolled out, they were ready to compete.
 
I am not sure what WOGL's billing was, but according to all access, they were not even in the top 8 in the 25-54. If this is a trend, this is not good for them. I really think they need to update their playlist with newer music. They still can play an occasionally 60s song, but I do not think 2-3 60s song an hour is working. I think they should play 1 60s song an hour.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom