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This article first appeared in the November 13, 1998 issue of HITMAKERS Magazine. For more information on HITMAKERS, visit them online at hitmakers.com... The Interview
BILL, HOW DID RADIORESEARCH.COM GO FROM IDEA PHASE TO A, EXCUSE THE PUN, VIRTUAL REALITY? In addition to my background in radio programming, from 1992 to 1996 I worked at Strategic Media Research in Chicago. Of course they do call-out and music testing for radio stations. I do strategic consulting for companies outside of the radio industry and have for the last two years; all the way from small companies to Fortune 1000 firms. In addition, in 1996 I began doing internet consulting work, helping the companies I work with come up with internet strategies. As I worked with my radio clients I realized, based upon my experience in radio, research, and the internet, that there was an opportunity to bring the three together and to develop a research system for radio stations on the internet. WHAT WERE SOME OF THE INITIAL HURDLES YOU HAD TO OVERCOME? I think technologically it's been fairly straight-forward. There are always challenges based around computers. The real hurdles have been educating radio managers about what this tool is and how they can use it. AND THAT'S WHERE MR. LITTLE COMES IN. JONATHAN, HOW DID YOU COME TO BE INVOLVED IN THIS? I heard about this project through a mutual friend, Tripp Eldridge, who worked at
AccuRatings and Strategic Media Research at the time Bill was there. He knew AND HOW HAS radioresearch.com BEEN INITIALLY RECEIVED? People who get it - people who understand the internet and its potential - are extremely excited about it. They take our quick tour, as you have done already, and they see the potential, because they want feedback from their listeners. They are people who realize that this is a way to get valuable information fed back to them by their listeners. BILL, EXPLAIN WHAT radioresearch.com IS. It's a completely internet-based, turnkey system that plugs into a radio station's web site and allows them to get feedback from listeners in the form of music testing and open-ended perceptual comments. It also allows the station to send out e-mail marketing to the database of people they develop. WHO ARE THE TYPES OF PEOPLE WHO PARTICIPATE? ARE WE TALKING ABOUT P1 LISTENERS OR JUST CASUAL CUMERS? Thus far, I think, the average radio station database that we've developed reflects about 95%-plus P1s. AND, JONATHAN, WHAT DOES A STATION DO TO SOLICIT LISTENER PARTICIPATION? That's done mostly through on-air liners and promos, Chris. Stations use those to invite people to visit their web site where there's a link that allows listeners to click on and become a member of the listener advisory panel, and that seems to have a very nice ring to it. Other stations just say, "Visit our web site and vote on the music we play." ONCE SOMEONE LOGS ON, EVEN IF IT'S JUST TO TAKE THE TOUR, BILL, WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO EXPERIENCE THAT WILL MAKE THEM EXCITED ABOUT THE PROCESS? Well, first of all, they click on the link on the radio station's web site and join the panel by signing up. Then, when the station is ready to have them answer some questions, an e-mail gets sent to that listener and the listener then goes to an on-line survey. That allows them to rate songs, where they can listen to the typical eight-second hook of a song and Real Audio. Using a five-point scale, they can say whether or not they are familiar or not with a given song. The station can do that for up to 30 songs and then they are allowed to ask a perceptual question. One of the great things about that is that there's no limit to the length of the answers. A respondent can go on and on and on and many of them do. Then, once they've taken the survey, it takes them right back to the radio station web site. IN PREPARING THIS INTERVIEW, I ASKED FOR SOME INPUT FROM PROGRAMMERS IN VARIOUS MARKETS. ONE QUESTION I HEARD SEVERAL TIMES CONCERNED SECURITY. WHAT TYPES OF SECURITY SYSTEMS ARE IN PLACE TO PREVENT A COMPETITOR OR SOMEONE WITH AN INTEREST IN THE SUCCESS OR FAILURE OF A RECORD FROM LOGGING ON MULTIPLE TIMES AND, POTENTIALLY, SKEWING THE SURVEY RESULTS? Well, the short answer to that is that we can add any level of security that the station needs to feel comfortable with the results. We have a lot of security features already built in to the system. Typically we don't explain what they are because that might tend to encourage someone to find a way to tamper with them. There are many, but here's one quick example of the kinds of things we can do: Let's say Chris Ruh decides he really likes a certain song and wants to take the test over and over again and keeps submitting a top score for that record. You just keep going back in and taking the test over and over again. An example of one security feature we have is that it would actually allow you to do that. You could take the test over and over again but, what you don't realize is that we only took your first results. We simply didn't take the input from the second, third, fourth and the fifth times you took the test. SO, IF I'M SO INCLINED, I BELIEVE I'M SUBMITTING RESPONSES THAT WILL BE, IN EFFECT, IN TAB BUT ACTUALLY AREN'T. Exactly. That does two things. First of all, it takes only one set of results from you. Second, it doesn't encourage you to figure out a way to get around the system because you simply don't realize the security is built in. There's lots of things like that in the system. JONATHAN, ANOTHER QUESTION I HEARD FROM SEVERAL PROGRAMMERS CONCERNED IDENTITY VERIFICATION. IN SHORT, HOW CAN A PROGRAMMER BE CERTAIN THE PERSON PARTICIPATING IS, IN FACT, WHO THEY CLAIM TO BE? Chris, I know you mentioned that to me before we spoke today. I guess I would give you the response that there are people who lie and are deceitful in various kinds of research that goes on. Undoubtedly a few people like deceiving others in some way, but what's the motivation for it? Your suggestion is it would be somebody from a label. OR A COMPETING RADIO STATION? Well, as I indicated, it's possible for a program director to take a look at the individual responses and deleted any that look suspicious. But really, because the system invites everybody in - anybody who's visited a station's web site and has indicated they want to be a member of the advisory panel - you just overwhelm it with the numbers. So many hundreds and thousands of people will have taken the test that if there are a few clunkers in there they won't really be statistically relevant. SO ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES, BILL, TO YOUR SYSTEM IS THE SAMPLE SIZE OF ANY GIVEN SURVEY WILL LIKELY BE MUCH LARGER THAN THE USUAL CALL-OUT SAMPLE SIZE. Chris, that speaks to something I wanted to touch on, and that is that we don't completely position this as a replacement for traditional research - auditorium testing and call-out. Those types of research do some things that this can't do yet, and this does some things that those types of research will never be able to do. SUCH AS? For an example, let's talk about random digit telephone samples. They're design-ed to get a completely random sample from throughout a given marketplace, distributed evenly, geographically proportionate by population, and so on. When we're letting people sign themselves up in this panel certainly we're not doing a random sample of the population. On the other hand, one example of something call-out can't do is get to a large number of the radio stations' P1s. In fact, most radio stations doing call-out have to force a certain number of P1s in their surveys. But by that means they're messing up their methodology and they might force 50 percent of their 80 call-out to be P1s. Well, 40 P1s might be okay to get a statistical look at a song, but with our system you can do 400, 4,000 or 40,000 P1s and get the feedback from an audience group that large. So this system does what traditional auditorium and call-out can't do. It gets almost your entire P1 audience involved in your radio station, and that's completely different than traditional call-out. So, our system and call-out really do different things. We can get you tremendous sample sizes like the kind I've just mentioned. AND, AS I UNDERSTAND IT, THIS IS REALLY A SELF-CONTAINED SYSTEM. ONCE A CLIENT IS ON BOARD, YOU HANDLE THE REST OF IT, YES? The system calculates the data in real time as people complete the surveys. At any time during the survey, or at the end, you as the program director or station manager have a password that allows you to log in privately and see the results. You can sort them, filter them, view them however you like. It's all stored on our system and it's privately password-protected, so you can get in and see it any time you want. DO I HAVE TO SEND YOU THE SONGS I WANT TO TEST, OR DO YOU HANDLE THAT, TOO? All you'd have to do is fax or e-mail us or even call us with a list of songs you want and what perceptual question you want asked and we'll handle everything from that point. We will procure the Real Audio hooks; we'll load them in for you; we'll run the test and we'll just let you know when the results are ready to look at online. WHAT TYPES OF CLIENTS WOULD BE BEST SERVED BY YOUR SYSTEM? We originally thought this was a tool for stations that maybe didn't have call-out. You mentioned at the beginning of the interview that there are some markets where you talk to folks who don't have a budget for traditional research, and we thought this originally might be a tool for small or medium-size markets, but, in fact, we've had great response from even the largest markets. In fact, by the end of the year, we'll have clients signed up to start in New York and L.A. We're already in Chicago at WTMX. We're in markets like Minneapolis and Kansas City. Large markets understand the value of getting those P1s involved in the radio station just as much as small markets, so it's something that stations that are already doing regular research see as a completely new way to get in touch with their audience. SO YOU SEE IT AS A SUPPLEMENT TO A STATION'S OVERALL RESEARCH MAT-RIX? Absolutely. Think of the effort people have gone to for years to go to Laurel, MD just get 20 written comments from listeners and diaries. Well, imagine if you could get 20,000 a week on any topic you want from your exact listeners. AMONG THE CLIENTS SIGNED UP SO FAR IS BILL RICHARDS. HE IS INVOLVED IN A UNIQUE WAY. TELL US ABOUT IT. Just like a radio station subscribes and has their local listeners participate in this, Bill is a client of ours who's using our system to develop a national panel of people. SO SIMILAR TO SAY WHAT R&R DOES WITH CALLOUT AMERICA, BILL IS TRYING TO DEVELOP A NATIONAL CALL-OUT PROFILE SO HE CAN GIVE THAT INFORMATION TO HIS CLIENTS AS AN ADDITIONAL PART OF THEIR RESEARCH MATRIX? Right. So he's using our software for a national panel instead of a local radio station using it for the local panel. WITHOUT THIS COMING ACROSS LIKE A SOFTBALL, WHAT KIND OF RESPONSE HAVE YOU RECEIVED THUS FAR FROM YOUR CLIENTS. Well, I could give you the names of a number of people who I'm sure would be happy to talk about it. One of the things you'll find in talking to these guys, not only do they like the research, but you can imagine the marketing benefit of getting thousands of your P1s involved in giving you their opinions. Just their good will toward the radio station is invaluable, but then there's also valuable data you can gather from them as well. Some of our clients like it almost strictly as a marketing and PR tool and some of them like it for really valuable research data and you'll find that many of them have different opinions on that, but a lot of them think it's incredibly cool. JONATHAN, WHAT I HEARD BILL JUST SAY IS THAT, IN ADDITION TO THE RESEARCH, THE INTERACTIVE NATURE OF THIS OFFERS GREAT DIRECT MARKETING POTENTIAL. ARE YOU SEEING THAT AS A SELLING POINT IN TRYING TO MARKET radio-research.com? As Bill indicated, you're going to find as you talk to some of the people who are using it that they think that is a huge plus. As far as promoting station events, like remotes, appearances and so on, people are seeing increased response at those type of events because they've told people about it using the e-mail feature. You've got the benefit of additional tune-in when you can e-mail everybody and say, "Be a millionaire for a day. The contest begins Monday at 7:20. Tune in for details." You can manipulate when they're listening and when they're showing up at different events. That's one of the real values of the e-mail database. LET'S TALK NUMBERS FOR A MOMENT, BILL. WITHOUT GETTING INTO PRICE QUOTES, HOW DOES YOUR SYSTEM COMPARE TO TRADITIONAL CALL-OUT AND PERCEPTUAL RESEARCH, BOTH IN TERMS OF UP-FRONT PRICE, STAFF OVERHEAD, NUMBER CRUNCHING, ETC? Well, I'm familiar with the prices that are charged for the strategic for a call-out program and I would say that if you compared the fact that you can run a weekly test here compared with a weekly program you'd run with an out-source company like Strategic (in-house is always a little harder to figure out because you have to count overhead and stuff), I would say it's a tenth of the cost. SO YOU OFFER MORE INFORMATION AT A LOWER COST? BILL: More and different information. JONATHAN: We should point out here is that you've got almost immediate, almost same day results. And when you e-mail people and say, "You're invited in to take a music test," they love it. BILL: That's really true. We've found, for example, and think of this compared to any other program you run, that as much as 40 percent of a station's P1s in the database will participate every time they're asked. That's huge. Forty percent of your listeners who signed up will do it and most of them do it right away. If they're sitting at their desk and they get the e-mail invitation from you it's a fun thing. They can do it right there at their desk at work and we've found that as much as 20 percent will do it within a couple of hours because they'll get the e-mail. "Hey, it's one of those things I'll do real quick." So, in fact, you can fire off the test, go to lunch and come back and see some results. JONATHAN, ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD TOUCH ON HERE? Early on some people were asking us, "Have you ever compared this to standard call-out research?" And the fact is we did the parallel study. Bill, maybe you want to mention that. Bill: Yes, certainly the methodologies are different so you can't compare them in that way. But what you will find is that popular songs are popular songs, and when we did a study side by side with traditional call-out, we found that over 75 percent of the time the songs tested very much the same. A popular song in one survey was a popular song in the other. So, in many ways, people's opinions out there are the same and this is just a great way to compare your loyal P1 audience with the market at large. SO IN ONE WAY, YOUR SYSTEM MAY PROVIDE A RADIO STATION WITH AN OPPORTUNITY TO EXAMINE BOTH ITS P1 LISTENERS AND ITS CASUAL CUMERS AND GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO SEE HOW THE TWO GROUPS ARE THE SAME AND HOW THEY ARE DIFFERENT WITHOUT SCREWING UP THEIR RESEARCH. Chris, that's correct and it goes back to that issue that I talked about earlier where a lot of stations today tend to sort of force a lot of P1s into their call-out. They're doing that so they can compare their P1s to the rest of the marketplace. The problem is that that screws up their sample of the rest of the marketplace. So this might be a way for them to have the sample of their P1s and let their call-out and auditorium tests go back to being what they really should be which is a reflection of the entire marketplace. GENTLEMEN, THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND CONTINUED SUCCESS. For additional information, contact:
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For as long as radio research has been around, programmers have
been wracking their brains trying to figure out how to increase sample sizes and gain the input of larger chunks of their P1
listeners. To this end, many a PD has looked for ways of trying to
force more P1 participation in their station's research. But what if a
way could be found that would make your station's partisans want to participate in your weekly research? Radio veteran Bill Troy may
have come up with just such an idea and here he and Jonathan Little (another stalwart radio pro who's acting in a marketing
capacity for the project) discuss radioresearch.com.