CULTURE
My Own Private Arbitron
Since the first of the year, I have been receiving calls from The Arbitron
Rating Service – a company that determines radio commercial rates –
asking whether I’ve received my January diary.
In each and every call, real people not only ask whether I’ve received my diary (among all the other junk mail I get every day) but whether I have received my “small gift” for participating. When I finally got around to opening the damned thing, there it was: my small gift, a crisp $1 dollar bill.
I was glad to participate. For one week in January, I would be one of 432 people in Chicago who tell the rating service what the rest of you 7.6 million people in Chicago are listening to. I would record what I was listening to in a daily diary and tell Arbitron where I was at the time (my home/my car/my work) and how long I listened. The only hitch, which I was too afraid to tell them at the time, is that I almost never listen to the radio.
When my diary arrived last week, I quickly noticed two things:
First, it was written predominantly in Spanish (with English as a second language.) I took this as a reflection of the fact I live in Bucktown, which has a strong Hispanic population, or Arbitron thinks there are a lot of Mexican and Puerto Ricans out there named Jacobs.
Second, I received not one but two diaries – one for me and one for my wife. Since the only time we even turn on the radio is during the 15 minutes we drive to work together, I did a little math and concluded our combined listening habits made up 1/231th of the sample, representing about 32,900 Chicagoans or, as they say in Radioland, a little under one rating point.
No sooner had I opened the mail, than I got another call from a woman at Arbitron.
“Did you get your diary?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Did it include the small gift?“ she asked.
“Do you mean the dollar bill?” I asked.
“So, you’ll fill it out and return it to us? “ she asked.
“Of course,” I said.
Last Thursday, my first day as a radio diarist, I woke up to newspaper headlines that 12 buried miners in West Virginia were miraculously alive. By the time I finished my morning Sun-Times and climbed into the car, they were dead. Or so I learned when I turned on the engine and the radio automatically came on tuned to NPR (WBEZ Chicago 91.5 FM.)
Because it was breaking news, I stayed with NPR all the way to work. If NPR broke for a promo, I clicked around to the other news radio stations -- WBBM News Radio and WLS-AM -- but quickly returned because their self-promotional jingles were even more irritating than what I’d left behind.
I was waiting for NPR to bring me a live press conference with the West Virginia governor when I arrived at my parking garage. So I turned off my engine (and radio) and went to work. I would catch it later on the evening news.
On Friday, I went to work with my wife and NPR was playing in the background. We were making plans for the weekend, so neither of us was actually listening. Time elapsed: 15 minutes.
Friday afternoon, I had to drive to an appointment about 45 minutes away. I left around 2 PM and returned around 5 PM. On my way there and back, I listened to the radio, mostly NPR. But now feeling the burden of the 32,900 listeners on my back, I decided to sample around the dial. I began by punching the “pre-set” buttons on my car radio (and discovering how it works.)
Besides the three stations I knew I could find
-- NPR, WBBM and WLS news radio -- I found eight more: two oldies stations
programmed by my wife and six others contributed by my teenage sons: 1000
AM (ESPN) and 670 AM (The Score) -- for sports -- and 92.3 (WPWX), 93.5 FM
(WXRT), 96.3 FM (The Killer ‘B’) and Q 101 FM -- for music.
I made a vow to give each station five minutes of my time – generously
sharing my rating point among them – but then I got to my appointment
and promptly forgot about it.
On Saturday, I took my dog for a walk in Humboldt Park. On the way there and on the way back, I listened to NPR. I consider Saturdays on NPR the Gold Star of radio. If there is such a thing as destination radio, it’s Car Talk, What’d You Know and This American Life.
As I went to the park, I caught the tail end of Michael Feldman’s show and was just catching the start of Ira Glass’s when we got to the park. All the while I was walking the dog, I was hoping he would do his duty (and I would have done mine) in time to hear Ira’s story about the best salesman at Z-Frank Chevrolet. But, alas, my dog was not on the same time frame as I was. Total listening time: 20 minutes.
On Sunday, I didn’t listen to the radio at all.
On Monday, my wife and I drove to work listening to Steve Edwards on NPR. Besides the usual Springfield report on the upcoming legislative session, there was a long interview with some woman about a water conservation study. Her best advice? Stop watering the sidewalks.
On Tuesday, I got in the car and the radio dial was still on NPR. They were broadcasting the Judge Alito confirmation hearings live from Washington, an experience somewhat akin to listening to paint dry. One pompous senator after another took the mic for the most self-indulgent reasons. I couldn’t wait to get to work.
But I was out running errands that day, so I caught the hearings again at midday and twice again in the afternoon. It became kind of a game trying to pick which senator was most embarrassing (I was leaning toward Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) until Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) got the mic.) I can’t say I heard much from Judge Alito, which was okay, since he didn’t plan to say anything anyway.
The hearings continued Wednesday, my last day as an Arbitron diarist. But my wife wanted to talk about a PBS series we watched the night before called “Country Boys.” So we turned down the radio -- letting the senators talk among themselves -- and conducted a kind of stimulating conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of documentaries.
Given the range of options radio offers, I feel bad that I haven't been more adventuresome in my dialing habits. So on the way home from work, I turned the dial down to the very lowest number and began counting up the number of discernible AM (34) and FM (41) stations I was missing.
In my week as an arbitrator of radio tastes, I have listened to the radio slightly less than five and a half hours, always in my car. All but 22 of those minutes were spent tuned to NPR. I logged only five minutes switching between the two most popular AM stations – WLS and WBBM News Radio – and when the Supreme Court hearings became too ponderous, I now admit I relieved my boredom with a little oldies music on 94.7 and 97.1 FM, The Drive.
When I got home, I hit the internet to see how my listening experience compares with others. On its website, Arbitron claims that 95% of Chicagoans listen to the radio every week, but usually only about 16% are tuned in at any one hour (and 5% listen in their cars.)
The average listener has the radio on 21 hours a week – four times as much as I do, according to Arbitron. The breakdown of what people are listening to is:
News/Talk 17%
Adult Contemporary 12%
Contemporary Hits 12% (and rising)
Rock 8.7%
Alternative Rock 3.7% (and sinking)
Classical Music 1.2%
Oldies 6%
Country 9%
Spanish Radio 10% (and rising)
Urban Radio 10% (and rising)
Jazz 2.7%
Religious 2.7%
When I looked at the latest ratings of Chicago stations by call letter, I was surprised to see my station (WBEZ), the one I listen to 94% of the time, doesn’t even get into the ratings book.
I called Arbitron to find out if that meant I -- and my 32,900 followers – would not be counted this week. “No, no,” the client services guy told me. “Write everything down. We tabulate all the results. We just don’t include public radio stations in our commercial radio reports.”
If WBEZ were included in the ratings book with other Chicago stations, it would rank around 12th or 13th in popularity – only a couple ratings points lower than the top rated WGCI-FM (urban rock.) According to the Radio Research Consortium, WBEZ has an audience of about 573,600 listeners every week and, in any one 15-minute increment, an average of 29,700 are actually tuned in.
I supposed I should have felt encouraged by this fact. But then it struck me that the research consortium report is based on Arbitron diaries. My diary. If I -- and my 32,900 followers -- turn off the car, should I just call WBEZ and tell them to stop broadcasting until I get back? Save the electricity? We’re not listening. And how do I tell the Spanish station owners who, I’m sure, were counting on me for a little bump in the pocketbook, sorry, they got the wrong guy?
My week as an Arbitron rater is officially over. I think I was a miserable failure. I only listened 25% as much as I should have. I didn’t even sample 70 of the 75 stations available to me. And most of the time my radio was on I was talking to my wife.
The one station I listen to doesn’t have commercials, so it’s treated as a kind of second-class citizen in the ratings game. The others get these numbers from Arbitron and massage me out in favor a 12-24 year-old demographic that not only listens to the radio but buys stuff.
The irony, of course, is that millions of advertising dollars are allocated every year based on this inexact, small and highly unscientific sampling of listening habits. Many layers of terminology (CUME, AQH, Daypart) are used to interpret the data, and thousands of media buyers are employed to interpret the results.
But my diarist’s advice to agency clients is: don’t spend the money. That’s just my opinion, of course. Next week, it’s someone else’s turn.