Listener Fidelity: Earning It. Keeping It
By Richard Harker

Richard Harker

Listener Fidelity is the commitment a listener has to a station.

Strong fidelity means the listener is loyal to the station and returns time after time. Weak fidelity (call it infidelity) means that the listener sometimes turns to a competitor rather than returning.

We’ve all seen listener fidelity.

Listeners excitedly talk about the station. They know the personalities by name and can talk about the station in great detail. They actively listen to the station, day in and day out.

The high level of station fidelity makes radio unique. Not many products or services can generate the level of fidelity that we find with radio.

That’s why discussions on ways to gain share often focus on exploiting listener fidelity.

If we can get these people who already spend a lot of time with the station to listen a little longer, we can increase time spent listening, TSL. If we do that, we’ll grow our share.

The logic makes sense. As TSL goes up, so does share. And given listener fidelity, it seems like TSL ought to be easy to increase.

And it does work in markets where Arbitron continues to use diaries.

The diary method of measurement rewards listener fidelity. Stations with loyal listeners get a disproportionate number of quarter-hours because station fans want to reward their favorite station.

Some feel that the diary is less accurate because it captures fidelity, but from a programming standpoint, the diary provides a better indication than the meter of how well a station is programmed.

Listeners don’t inflate their listening in the diary. They just more faithfully record their listening giving greater weight to their favorite stations.

P-1 stations (and P-2 stations to a lesser degree) show up more often in the diary because listeners more actively listen to their favorite stations. They may listen to other stations, but not at the same level of engagement.

The other benefit of listeners with station fidelity is that they actually mail back their completed diaries, again to reward their favorite station.

But unfortunately, none of this is true with PPM.

PPM does not capture fidelity. It better captures “drive-by” listening, the brief listening spans of cumers.

For reasons we’ll outline below, PPM drive-by listening generates shorter listening spans that do not lend themselves to exploitation.

We can see the problem in the findings of research Arbitron conducted in PPM markets.

Arbitron compared similarly formatted stations across all PPM markets and found no difference in TSL between #1 stations and their nearest competitors. Daily TSL worked out to be about an hour for both.

According to Arbitron, listeners in PPM markets do not spend more time with top ranked stations than the other options within a format.

Exploiting listener fidelity in a PPM market is even more challenging when you look more closely.

TSL can be increased two ways. We can get people to listen longer per occasion, or we can get people to come back to the station more often. Either one will increase TSL.

Arbitron claims that listening spans are identical for virtually every station in every format. According to Arbitron, listening spans at nearly every station are either nine or ten minutes.

Whether you’re top-ranked or well down the ranker, Arbitron says there’s no difference in listening spans.

That leaves only increased occasions, the number of times a person tunes in, to impact ratings. If you can increase occasions, TSL will go up, and shares will follow.

But Arbitron found virtually no difference in occasions between the top stations and their challengers. Even if you include struggling stations that have no chance of being competitive, the difference is little more than one single occasion.

So in PPM markets, the belief that increasing TSL, and more specifically increasing occasions, can help grow shares doesn’t pan out.

But there’s still a way to increase share. The same Arbitron research showed that stations with a large cume beat stations with smaller cume.

To confirm Arbitron’s national observation, Harker Research looked at several markets and found the same thing. Stations with larger cumes invariably beat competitors with smaller cumes.

In contrast, stations with higher occasions were beat by similarly formatted stations with fewer occasions.

So if your competitor has more listeners–more cume, it is very likely that the station is also beating you in share.

And there’s little chance that you can close the gap just by increasing occasions.

But why?

If increasing TSL works with the diary, but it doesn’t work with PPM, why the difference?

It may have something to do with the magical 9-10 minute listening spans that Arbitron finds.

The claim that Urban, CHR, Classic Rock, Spanish, Active Rock, and Hot AC listeners all listen the same length of time is contrary to intuition, observation, and to Arbitron’s own forty years of research.

Perhaps there is something about meter technology that results in drop-outs every nine or ten minutes. Maybe its not that listeners turn off the radio every nine or ten minutes, but the meter thinks they do.

But perhaps there’s also something about how we treat our listeners.

Quarter-hour maintenance is too often treated mechanically, designed to manipulate listening rather than reward it.

Endless teases that ultimately deliver little value might work for a while, but end up disappointing listeners.

We can manipulate a listener’s behavior to keep them around one more quarter-hour, but unless there’s a valuable pay-off for sticking around, we’re treating the listener like a laboratory rat trained to push the right button for a food pellet.

It’s hard to build fidelity when we treat listeners like rats.

Rather than treat appointment listening and quarter-hour maintenance as a way to fool and manipulate a listener’s immediate behavior, think about it as a means to build long-term listener fidelity.

Think about ways to build listener fidelity:

• Strong listener fidelity is built by delivering a compelling product that listeners can enjoy right now, not just at 20 minutes after the hour.
• Strong listener fidelity is built by delivering what listeners want every day, and making sure things they don’t want don’t get on the air.
• Strong listener fidelity is built by creating a product that is crafted, not just thrown together with little thought about how all the pieces fit together. 

Maybe the problem is with PPM technology, and the meter can’t hold a signal for longer than ten minutes. But maybe radio has become so consumed with gaming PPM that programmers are compromising their products to be more PPM “friendly” and in the process harming listener fidelity.