Radio Sales Café

News Item:
Arbitron released its March RADAR Network Ratings and says nearly 180 million people 12 and over heard at least one network commercial per week during the survey period. That's 68 percent of the 12 plus population. Arbitron says in the 25-54 demo, 71.7 percent were reached and in the 18-49 demo 70.9 percent of the population heard at least one commercial. 46 networks are part of Arbitron's RADAR survey and nearly 396,000 people were sampled from January to December in 2012. (RadioINK 3/19/13)

Forgive me for being underwhelmed by this, but my first thought after reading this is: "So what?"

Most people 12 and older have heard at least one radio commercial? Is this a statistic that leads anyone to draw an inference that's even remotely useful?

The same type of information is used by the newspaper, cable TV, Yellow Pages, and other media to tout their popularity or relevance to consumers. Is anyone truly impressed by it?

Seems to me there are more practical and useful ways to measure measure radio's strengths than this.

What do you think?

What's an Arbitron?  Can you eat it?  Can you see it? Can you explain it? I agree with you Rod - "So What".  We have sold radio for 23 years without an Arbitron. Video testimonials from businesses and pictures of events where listeners show up... both taken and presented on the Ipads we have equipped our Sales Staff with - that is real, relevant data that a potential radio advertiser can understand and relate to.

By the way, does anyone else see the irony in the similarity of root word in Arbitron and Arbitrary?

ar·bi·trar·y  

I took about every undergrad statistics course you could take in college and could never understand how the extrapolation of data from 500 diaries for 400,000 listeners could be accurate. The old answer of "its the best we got to use" (usually coming from the mouths of an advertising agency) is tiresome and lazy.

We sell with documented results, testimonials and pictures from events. Real proof for real people.

If competing media is using 12+ data to pump their numbers, we have to play in the same sandbox...at least initially.