Rocky Mount-Wilson no longer in arbitron ratings

[viper452]

Why?

 

[w00t]

Probably everyone in the market quit paying and all that was left was the River, WRAL, and Foxy.

 

[quadraphonic]

That sounds about right.

 

[allenv]

I remember back in 06 some were giddy that R Mount/Wilson was going to be a rated market and some paid alot of money to make it happen and from day one it failed....Just think of what all those dollars could have been used for...Employees,equipment,promotions... these things give you a return on your investment..Just my opinion..

 

[quadraphonic]

Small market stations should sell results instead of numbers from surveys anyway.

 

[w00t]

It failed because they found out the Raleigh stations far outranked the locals. If I remember it right, Foxy had double digits, followed by WRAL, River, QDR. WNCT and Bob were up there too. WZAX was well below 10th. Foxy was beating 92.1/95.5 by a good margin.

 

[allenv]

95.5 has pretty good numbers as does 98.5....One of the major problems for stations is there are simply too many stations on the dial fighting for a piece of the pie...There is only so much to go around and I agree stations like Dawg and Power should be selling success stories of how the stations helped clients...Arbitron be damned...Its the same deal at 1070.We have some numbers yes but we have to show a potential advertizer how the station has helped other businesses..The Mom and Pop's are our bread and butter and most of them could care less about numbers.....When you have a good book that's great but where the books fall is so unpredictable...You just never know but when you establish a good relationship with a client that is what is the real deal is.

 

[ToddJenkins]

Good point, Allen. When Danny Jacobson ran Lucky 13 there in Greenville he constantly sold out the station's inventory while never really pulling big numbers. He knew his audience - and super served it. And he knew each of his clients - and built lasting relationships that brought in spots when times were tough. Even lowly 'BZQ did this with its southern gospel format (until the IRS raid anyway).

I'm glad the Rocky Mount / Wilson book is gone.
It didn't help sell ads, it hurt!

When WGTM (which was silent due to transmitter issues) scored higher than WZAX during one of those books I knew that you could't trust the dairy numbers anyway.

 

[amfmxm]

Arbitron has lost a couple dozen smaller markets in the past three or four years, mostly due to the advertising recession. Two or three big problems. One, the whole ad industry dropped around 30 percent in revenue, but Arbitron wouldn't budge on their annual price increases. Secondly, national and regional business--the main reason for having Arbitron in small markets--collapsed. And thirdly, Arbitron is making so much money off the PPM markets that they really don't give a good shit about small diary markets anymore--they wish they would all just go away.

It is a case of a monopoly acting in the worst monopolistic fashion: "We don't care if radio income has crashed. Your price is going up because we say it's going up, and if you don't like it, you can leave."

So a lot of markets did, including Rocky Mount.

 

[ToddJenkins]

Well said, amfmxm

 

[allenv]

Arb owns the ball & the court...If you want to play you've gotta pay.

 

[quadraphonic]

To me, relying on Arbitron always sounded like a crutch, like you're waiting for someone else to name you "#5" but hoping to spin it into "#1 in some demographic." And paying them to run some flawed diary program and waiting for the numbers every quarter.
You should always be "#1" in your listeners' and advertisers' hearts, and you should have a pretty good grasp on whether you are or not, regardless of whether or not anyone else agrees.
Of course, I never worked in a major market, and even at that only in small markets for a relatively short time. So whaddainoe?