Radio Talent Coach Sam Weaver is an authority  on working with air talent in terrestrial radio, on line radio, and podcasting.  E-mail thecoach@radiocoach.biz 1 888 680 7234.  Sam works with beginners and veterans.

Most in radio have an opinion about PPM and how it affects programming. It is merely a way of measuring the listening audience with methodology geared to an obedient panelist. These individuals are rewarded and can potentially serve up to two years. Ironically, not long ago, radio researchers frowned on creating professional listening panels. Research is never the problem; it’s the interpretation, implementation, and overreaction to research that is often the problem. It can be very destructive in the wrong hands.

24 Hour Cycle
PPM is to radio what cable news and social media has been to the 24-hour news cycle—instant information. Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous utterance, “The urgency of now”, is what Media Monitor and weeklies provide—rapid feedback.

Fact
Research has been a mainstay for contemporary music programmers dating back to Jack McCoy; things like callout, auditorium testing, and perceptual. PPM has created nothing more than a quicker way to access vital information. The notion PPM has created a new way of programming is amusing. In fact, it has reiterated the original mainstays of music radio. Regardless of the method of measurement, the importance of playing the right music and announcers entertaining in a concise manner has always resulted in good radio. The term “too much talk” has been a constant theme with researched consumers. When analyzed, it’s really the jock talking about nothing, too many commercials and recorded interruptions, and an overall presentation in need of tweaking. Announcing department store “Blue Light” specials every twenty minutes is less talk, but it is not good radio.

Nothing to Fear
PPM is not the boogieman, it’s just new audience measurement with its own language, re-defined success, and on-going sample readjustments. The answer to “Now” has successful roots in the past. This is a business of copycats. It will only take one power broker to allow some programmer to concentrate solely on training jocks how to entertain again. This ability will carry over to satellite, Internet radio, and all future technology. Listeners are not robots, they like to be entertained. Shut up and play the music is lazy—instruction requires work. The best analogy is when a song uses actual musical instruments compared to keyboard synthesizers.

Where Do Person to Person Workers Come From?
Never say never. Originally Arbitron insisted the person to person methodology applied in Houston, would never be used anywhere else. However, pressures of cell phone-only households and the need to increase the quality of PPM panels persuaded our rating buddies to have a change of heart. Now the $64,000 question is, how does Arbitron recruit people in the field to conduct door-to-door, or rather, person-to-person canvassing? Do they contract companies in each city (another assumption), and “faces” to match the majority of those living in neighborhoods they are canvassing, to maximize cooperation?

How reliable are the people they use? Remember Acorn? For answers, all I had to do was look to Ed Cohen, Vice President-Research Policy and Communication for Arbitron.

Who recruits and trains field workers?

Ed Cohen: “First of all, anyone doing in-person recruiting for Arbitron is an Arbitron employee. We do not use contractors. The people that do the work are trained by Arbitron. In fact, if you go on the Arbitron corporate website right now, you’ll find a few openings for those positions under ‘careers’ and by looking at the position description, you’ll get a good idea of the kind of people we have and are recruiting. Needless to say, using our own employees gives us a much greater degree of control over their work.”

How do you deal with the HDBA (High Density Black Area) and HDHA (High Density Hispanic Area) in terms of increasing potential cooperation person-to-person with the majorities living in a neighborhood?

Ed Cohen: “The best answer I can give you is that our folks are very good at what they do. Admittedly, knocking on doors to get households to participate in the PPM is not easy, but their efforts are in line with our original projections and in some cases, ahead of what we expected. It’s a matter of good hiring and good training.”

Radio is theater of the mind—draw your own conclusions.