fang39 said:
Not a fabrication, Cat. If you read my statement, you'd note that I was paraphrasing when I said "when you come right down to it." I've actually particpated in several different testing modes. In the early 90's, I was regular of a "telephone survey" for a local radio group, which consisted of about 20-30 minutes of Q&A about listening habits and music sound bytes. Compensation for this was a mailer-pack with coupons and a gift certificate to a local restaurant. Did that about 6 times over a three year period.
That is called "call out" research, and almost exclusively done by stations that play currents and recurrents as a supplement to AMTs which are seldom done more than 2 times a year due to cost. The idea is to track new adds to see if they are working, and to determine current categories and rotations.
Compensation is not often given, so you were fortunate. And not all callout operations build panels, and few go as far as to use a panelist 6 times.
I've also taken part in "auditorium" (actually it was a Hotel Banquet Room) testing of the pre-dial variety,
Only a couple of companies use dials. More still use the paper form and Scantron to process. The advantage of the dial is that results can be given the very next morning... even with complexities like cluster analysis or "fit" scores.
where I had to rate several hundred songs by "my listening preference" and was then invited to join the ensuing focus group.
A breakout session is not that common, so you had an interesting experience. Many stations will not use focus groups due to the group dynamic generated in them, but a break out generally identifies a subset of the participants in the ATU (based on sign-in data or recruit data) which is consulted about some station concern that requires verbatim responses. Typical would be music mix issues, changes in themorning show, interest in a contest or to preview a potential TV spot. What did they ask you in the post-test session?
For these tests, I was paid $100 each.
Incentive can run from $40 to over $150, based on the level required to get people to show up. In Boise or Fresno, where traffic is not so bad, $40 might work. On Long Island, less than $125 and nobody shows.
And so, I stand by my statement, although slightly ammended..."when you come right down to it, that's exactly what it is because the diagnostics indicate if song A "tested" better than song B, then song B should not be played (or played less frequently)" 'Nuff said!
You are oversimplifying. Once a station has tested a few times, there are not that many songs that do not make the "playable" categories. It's all about adjusting spins... songs that are getting a bit burnt get slowed down (or rested) and ones that score high may get pushed up. Since there is a margin of error of several percent, even with a dial (paper tends to divide scores into quintiles, while dials are 0 to 100 usually) there is a gray area between rotation categories where the PD has to look at many different scores on a song (men, women, young, old, heavy listeners, etc.) to decide where a song belongs. This is where the difference between a paint by numbers PD and a good, intuitive, talented, creative PD come into play.
