WCPT-FM DeKalb sold

[JJSPC]

Radio Insight announced that WCPT-FM 92.5 is being sold to EMF. Now all of the original simulcast partners of WCPT 820 will have gone away. Guess liberal talk can't even be successful in Chicago. How long will it be before the AM goes away?

https://radioinsight.com/headlines/170809/emf-acquires-wcpt-fm/

 

[Rex Radio]

WCPT is actually doing quite well on it's own.

My read is Newsweb's owner is aging and wants to wind down non-core assets before it's too late. They will be down to 5 stations from a peak of 9 in 2005-2012.

My understanding is this is painful to him as he is a local having grown up in Dekalb. But there is no real way to operate the singleton station at a profit from afar. It needed to be paired up with now sold B-95. Or with another operator. Larry Nelson could not buy it as the anti-trust advertising limit would be eclipsed. And the owners of WRHL could not afford to swallow it. That left very few options.

RG

 

[davideduardo]

WCPT is actually doing quite well on it's own.

It's 42nd in billing in the market... and it did not show in July, August or September.

Unless "well" is being redefined, WCPT is not it.

 

[Rex Radio]

Source? Newsweb is incredibly tight with their internal financials. They owe it to no one to make known their revenue.

RR

 

[davideduardo]

Source? Newsweb is incredibly tight with their internal financials. They owe it to no one to make known their revenue.

RR

The ratings data is from the PPM reports. For
revenue, there are several sources for industry data other than stations themselves.

 

[Rex Radio]

PPM ratings data is unavailable for WCPT as they don't subscribe. Which as I recall hearing, they don't sell by total audience. Rather, targeted demo listeners. So the ranking is irrelevant to the McDonald's of the advertising world who blindly ignore demo leaders by just looking at rankers and cume.

If a station owns the demo it targets, then it's doing "well".

RR

 

[b-turner]

I would say a station is doing well when it is paying it's bills and throwing off a little profit. Listeners are great and dominating the target demo is great but you still have to turn that in to the money to pay the bills.

I worked a station that was fairly dominant in a small market, easily #2 or #3 with listeners but management was so bad the sales department was a revolving door of salespeople. The station lost money every month and billed only 10-15% of what the top station billed. In this instance they had a very desirable demo among advertisers. For this station, salespeople couldn't claim a client until they got them on the air meaning more than one salesperson could call on the client and salespeople were offered a base salary based on what they blindly felt they could sell. If you couldn't produce the results in 30 days, your base pay was adjusted to a base salary based on your first 30 days meaning 90% walked out after 30 days. It was insane. Every station I worked gave salespeople the protection to cultivate a relationship with the client for the long run or in other words, a protected account list.

I come from both a programming and sales background, so I understand listeners is the product you are really selling because listeners produce results for advertisers that are sold commercials. It's the chicken and the egg syndrome. Without the programming sales suffers and without the sales,programming suffers. Success comes by having both the chicken and the egg.

 

[davideduardo]

PPM ratings data is unavailable for WCPT as they don't subscribe.

PPM data for every station (unless it is not encoded, a very rare situation) is available to subscribers and agencies.

WCPT shows up occasionally, but not recently. It last showed in June.

 

[davideduardo]

Which as I recall hearing, they don't sell by total audience. Rather, targeted demo listeners. So the ranking is irrelevant to the McDonald's of the advertising world who blindly ignore demo leaders by just looking at rankers and cume.

If a station owns the demo it targets, then it's doing "well".

What "targeted demo" does WCPT "own" if it does not even get a 0.1 in the ratings over the last three books?

Agencies buy against the AQH audience, not the cume. AQH (which can be expressed as average listeners, share or rating) is a measure of how many people will hear each ad. Cume does not do that.

And agencies look at rankers based on their target demo... a buy might be for English Dominant Hispanic Females 25-44 if they were promoting a lunch menu for women with small children.

Demos are everything in agency buys.

They run a rank report on the target (age range, gender, ethnicity, income, language preference, education, etc. as required by the client) and then get rates from the stations that are in the top tier to see if they meet the Cost Per Point goal of the buy. They do not look at stations that rank low in the target demos.

Only when they have a group of acceptably buys based on delivery and CPP do they use cume to verify the campaign's reach and frequency. If there is unnecessary duplication, they might eliminate a station that only re-delivers the same cume and add a station that extends the reach if that station meets the CPP goals.

Demographics, in the case of Nielsen, are any of the twenty-some stratification variables that are used to establish sample characteristics in the survey. As mentioned, the demographic "baskets" are age (generally age ranges following the Census subsets), ethnicity, education, income, county and zone of residence, gender, language preference among Hispanics, etc.

I think you have a misunderstanding of the term "demo" and hopefully this clarifies that.

 

[Rex Radio]

Not sure what you are referencing, but non-paying/subscribing stations are no longer listed at all. That started at the beginning of this year. Even paying agencies and stations no longer see what the non-paying stations are doing in any manner. So not seeing WCPT (or WIND, WYLL, or a handful of other stations which don't subscribe) is by no means an indication they are not showing in the ratings. Nielsen is simply not releasing any data on them to anyone.

Turns out, some agency subscribers were leaking data to non-subscriber stations. So Nielsen put an end to that by pulling every/anyone not paying from all released data. Not just the "public" general data they release for all to see.

RR