Sometimes it is so hard to write a blog. You get writers block. You don’t know what to write or if any of your thoughts are any good. One moment you have an idea that you think is amazing and the next you think to yourself, no one will care about this. And then there’s the word count. How many words do you write? Oh that’s right, between 350 and 500 or was it 500 to 750? Today I like 350 to 500. Now what should I write about? Well my focus is on marketing, advertising and consulting. So let’s talk about Advertising. In fact lets talk about measuring advertising.
How do you buy advertising if you don’t know how to measure it? I usually measure advertising with the Arbitron ratings. They are as old as dirt in the radio business and they have their flaws. So why use them for radio advertising you say? The answer is that even though the old diary method is not very accurate we at least know everyone uses the same in-accuracies. It is like shooting a gun that the sight is out of whack. If you always use it like that then eventually you learn to shoot somewhere else to hit your target. Does that make sense? Even though the Arbitron diary has its problems in measuring advertising, it at least was consistent with those problems. After a few years the advertisers started to build systems that compensated for those in-accuracies. Also, after a few years advertisers started to know how to price advertising on a station and compare those prices more strategically.
The problem I am facing in our hometown of Chico is that the radio stations don’t want to pay for the ratings in this down economy, making measuring advertising that much harder. Two of the three radio groups have stopped paying for the ratings. So here is my question, how do I know what is a fair price for my clients if no one can see how well a station is doing? The answer is we can’t. Measuring advertising for clients is next to impossible. It’s a crapshoot at best. In the end it seems like the radio stations want us to just take their word for it and that just doesn’t work for me. I wonder what we’ll do? What do you think a solution might be?
