I Want My PPM

1
I Want My PPM

• Larry Goldstein, Chief Research Innovation
  Officer, Media Management, Inc.
• November, 2005 Speech to the
• Arbitron Advertiser/Agency Advisory Council
• Arbitron Radio Advisory Council
• Washington, DC

2
How will PPM Change Planning

• Im going to cheat just a bit and expand the
  topic to cover a few other benefits given my
  wider interest in RD and the whole picture for
  agencies and our clients.
• The switch from measuring media usage in the U.S.
  via random samples with diaries to panels with
  electronic metering is not new. With apologies
  to Chicken Little, we did it in National
  television and the sky did not fall. We did it
  in top local markets and the sky did not fall.
• (We can and should avoid bad PR this time around
  there is NO benefit to trotting out research
  issues in public where consumers could be
  inspired to stop participating in research).

3
How will PPM Change Planning

• Yesterday, Steve Morris said Theres a lot for
  stations to lose. Introducing PPM will not make
  radio listeners disappear. If ratings decline
  vs. diaries, they were never there to begin with.
  This parallels results from the people meter and
  television ratings. Advertisers did not bail out
  of television. Instead, the market continued to
  grow.
• Theres a lot to see as positive for radio in a
  PPM world
• Planners will have more confidence in the
  accuracy of the measurement and so will their
  clients.
• Improved stability will take some of the risk out
  of radio reducing the dissonance that occurs
  when your plan turned into a buy and some
  stations inexplicably tanked. Will they be up in
  the next book? Was it an aberration or something
  real? The ratings service is supposed to be the
  umpire in the radio ball game no instant
  replays allowed.

4
How will PPM Change Planning

• Higher reach will be good for radio. Theres a
  bias in our business that has been around much
  longer than recency planning and reach
  optimization if planners and buyers simply
  follow their instincts, they would almost always
  buy more stations, more programs, more magazine
  titles all reach-oriented executions.Reach is
  not everything. Its the effect of each exposure
  that contributes to overall effectiveness. But
  TOO MUCH frequency can be a very inefficient way
  to spend our clients money. The key thing is to
  match the way we deploy media at any one time
  and across time to fit the task.

5
How will PPM Change Planning

• Steve mentioned the funnel measures commonly used
  in the automotive business. Sometimes we need to
  move awareness (relatively easy to do), sometime
  move a brand into the acceptable set, create
  preference, generate word of mouth (harder to do)
  and so on. The easy task requires more reach,
  the harder stuff more frequency, but we reach
  diminishing returns relatively quickly we dont
  need to expose an individual prospect 48 times in
  a week unless the intention is literally beat
  them over the head.
• Sports has always been a problem. Before I was
  hoodwinked into joining the research end of the
  business, I was a planner and we spent a lot of
  time evaluating sports sponsorships. Give me
  real measurement of your audiences, not an
  inflated poll of the home teams fan base. These
  will be numbers I wont feel compelled to cut in
  half.

6
How will PPM Change Planning

• We think we can make enormous progress with new
  targeting capabilities via PPM. The PPM device
  can capture visits where in-store audio is
  encoded (our clients GAP and OLD NAVY
  participated in Houston to prove this out). That
  means we could potentially target GAP or OLD NAVY
  shoppers, a leap forward vs. demos. Database
  integration may well provide other opportunities.
  Regardless of the currency used to transact our
  business with stations, we really need
  measurement of listening by our REAL targets
  ratings, RFs, response models and so on. The
  PPM data stream is tailor-made for this in ways
  that diaries can barely support at all.
• We would also see support for a national database
  of qualitative ratings product users, shoppers,
  and so on in addition to the full blown
  exposure and response data. And we should have
  the ability to extract local market data as we
  can in the Nielsen PxP data.

7
How will PPM Change Planning

• With multimedia measurement, we will find better
  ways of predicting the net exposure and impact of
  our overall campaigns. No other audience
  measurement service has the potential to do this
  as effectively not Simmons, not MRI. We can
  find out exactly what consumers were exposed to,
  not just what they remember.
• Sophisticate clients use econometrics, marketing
  mix modeling, to help ferret out the independent
  effects of various elements of the marketing mix,
  whether price, promotion, television, radio, all
  the things they use to drive their business. We
  counsel them to assure that ALL elements are
  included and accurately represented. The impact
  of anything left out will be distributed across
  those elements that are included. Anything
  incorrectly represented will also introduce
  distortion. Its important that we accurately
  show what it is we got when we invested in radio.
  PPM does it better and gives us ways to find out
  not only how these stimuli worked on a top-line
  basis, but who they worked best against and more.

8
How will PPM Change Planning

• Lets not forget what radios core strength is.
  You all know this. It may be why you are in the
  radio business. The industry is fired up about
  engagement. Youve got it. I dont need
  research to tell me its there. But PPM has
  already proven it.
• Remember those heavy listeners who MASSIVELY
  OVERSTATED their time spent listening to their
  favorite stations in Houston? Was it because
  they simply cannot remember what they listen to
  or when? Maybe they LOVE those stations. Local
  disc jockeys and morning talk show hosts are
  often local heroes. Its all reflective of the
  same thing many of their listeners are
  over-the-top engaged. Thats not a bad selling
  point.

9
How will PPM Change Planning

• PHD is active in every market. I had a long
  discussion with the directors of our Local Media
  Network (LMN) about PPM. Theyve learned to roll
  with the punches as change seems to come from
  every direction and expect the same here. Based
  on our assessment, heres our bottom line on PPM
• We like the accuracy better than diaries give
  us a personal meter vs. recall every time
• We like the stability
• We like the out of home measurement
• We think it will help to cut down on the
  incessant promotion of station call letters with
  PPM you no longer need to spend so much time
  REMINDING DIARY-KEEPERS who they are listening to
  and can use that time to entertain, inform and
  engage them.
• ALL station groups in PPM markets MUST support
  this effort and encode their programming.

10
How will PPM Change Planning

• Im just a bit too old for the MTV crowd, but
  Ill take a bit of liberty with their old slogan
  
• I want my PPM