Sponsor (Oct-Dec 1962)

SELLER § VIEWPOINT By William K. McDaniel Executive vice president NBC Radio What NBC wants in audience measurement Over the past few years the techniques of buying and selling advertising media have been developed to a highly scientific degree. The "emotional buy" still occurs but the great majority of media selections are made on the basis of thorough analyses of media characteristics as they fit the advertising requirements of a particular product. It therefore becomes the obligation of the seller to provide the buyer with as complete an analysis of his medium as possible. To do this he must make use of an audience measuring service or a combination of services which supply the necessary information. What is this information? Based upon our selling experience at NBC Radio, these are the elements which we expect would be provided by the "ideal" audience measurement service. First, since we are a national medium, we require a true national measurement based upon a scientifically and accurately selected national sample. This service must measure all network programing, not only in blocks of time, but also in terms of five-minute units and minute averages. The ideal rating service must provide information on cumulative, unduplicated audiences over periods of one week, four weeks and even longer periods. Linked closely with this, it should be possible to determine the frequency with which network commercials are delivered. Ideally, this should be available in terms of listeners as well as homes, since radio listening today has become almost entirely an individual activity as opposed to an activity involving the whole family or other groups. A balancing of media is of the utmost importance in today's advertising. One of our most effective demonstrations of network radio's values has been in demonstrating through radio/tv duplication studies the increases in both reach and frequency which network radio can deliver ,and which it can deliver with a high degree of economy. We expect, therefore, that our rating service should be able to provide us with such studies. In other words, it must measure both m» Named executive v.p., NBC Radio, in 1961, William K. McDaniel was an NBC page in 1938, later sales exec for Scripps-Howard Radio. After World War II service and several station posts in Los Angeles, he became mgr., ABC western div. network sales. He later became gen. mgr., KATBC, San Francisco. In 1056 he was appointed v.p., sales, NBC Radio, and v.p., NBC Radio, in I960. radio and television. Ideally it would be able to give us this information for magazine and newspaper readership of ads so that a total media buy could be viewed and evaluated in terms of people and costs. Every media buyer wants to know the type of audience he will reach. Will the age, income, location, and other marketing characteristics meet the needs of the product, and will the weaknesses of one medium be strengthened by another? For example, it is a well known fact that not all families or all people are alike in their television viewing habits. Some are heavy viewers who spend as much as 76 hours a week looking at television, whereas at the bottom of the scale a large number of people average under 1 1 hours of viewing per week. In our opinion an audience measurement service should be able to tell us how the use of network radio can balance out advertising pressure in those homes where television viewing is light. An essential function of an audience measurement service is that it measure the total audience to the medium and that it should, of course, provide all of the previously discussed marketing information on this total audience. Unfortunately, this ideal situation does not exist for network radio. You do not have to look very far or very often to realize that automobile radios and self-powered radios account for the bulk of total radio listening. Efforts are being made to accomplish this total measurement but there is great room for improvement. This, unfortunately, is a problem which the whole broadcast industry must face. The day is not far off when portable television sets, which are becoming more prevalent in use all the time, will produce a measurement problem in that medium. It would be ideal if one measurement system could sell us the total service that we need. We have not yet reached that point, but the time must come very soon when radio audiences can be adequately and completely measured. ^ 66 SPONSOR/26 November 1962