Sponsor (July-Dec 1955)

question, and maybe Midgley can throw in a thought on this, is where does the point of listener objection or oversaturation, where does the resentment set in? Ned, have you any thought, has there been any research of that that you know of? NED MIDGLEY: Frankly, I don't know a thing about that. I have never seen any research that would indicate it. I think the best thing to do is to go from 800 to 1,000 to 1,200. When sales start dropping off, cut back. Q. For a moderately heavy saturation radio campaign, say, 100 announcements weekly on an average, do you feel there should be a minimum length of the campaign for maximum effectiveness, say, six weeks? A. (From Kevin Sweeney) Well, I owe a debt to Lincoln. It is one of those how-long-should-a-man's-legs-be question. The truth is I don't know. We have been doing a large amount of work to find out, and we have been finding different patterns. We have worked in two markets with nighttime announcements and we find different patterns in people's ability to remember the announcements, both of which are in our opinion extremely good radio announcements. We think it has something to do with the type of products, but we don't know anything about that yet. It is a guess, and, thank God, other media don't have better answers than we have. Q. In connection with the wide coverage of radio and to a lesser extent television circulation, what kind of coverage or circulation within a week's time do you feel is desirable? A. (From Kevin Sweeney) We bought a saturation campaign for an advertiser, and found again that the ability of the human male and female to withstand advertising messages is miraculous. For this particular advertiser we evolved a scheme under which every family in this area, which was a city of 500,000, would be reached 16 times. Into his store the next day came the biggest mob of people he ever had, a tremendously successful sale. And yet only 60% of the people who were in that store had heard about this particular sales event via their radios. * * * Seminar 10, PAGE 29 WHAT DOES COVERAGE COVER? Speakers: Julie Brovm, director of media research, Compton; Ed Shurick, national director of station relations, CBS TV. Moderator of this seminar was Vera Brennan, head timebuyer, Scheideler, Beck & Werner, New York. HOW TO DETERMINE COVERAGE JULIE BROWN: There has never been one single standard for coverage in the broadcast industry. Actually, this is perfectly understandable, because coverage, per se, is used for so many different types of media evaluation. Coverage can mean the intensity of a station's signal, or it can mean the degree of a station's penetration. It can determine the extent of a media plan by markets or by sales territories. It must be defined in order to determine where coverage is lacking. Coverage is needed for station evaluation and selection and, in some instances, must be tied in with marketing strategy. Some brands may only have distribution in a metropolitan area. A station whose coverage area best fits this market probably should be used. A brand with national distribution, however, might want to choose the larger, or largest station in the market. Thus, although we have only cited a few reasons, it should be self-evident that a timebuyer must/ have good sound coverage data for radio and television stations in order to do an adequate job in making broadcast purchases. Coverage, as we define it, is the area in which people can receive the signal of the station and do listen or view the station on some kind of a regular basis. Thus, the primary or effective coverage area of a station is the area in which we may assume that most people can and do hear or see the station. If we wanted to be able to develop sound coverage areas for all radio and television stations, we should have an upto-date county by county survey showing the percent of homes that listen to or view each station with some degree of frequency. Unfortunately, this type of study has not been made since 1952, when Nielsen conducted its coverage study and the Standard Audit Measurement, commonly called SAMS, was made. These studies still are valid for the majority of the radio stations. But, unfortunately, the pre-freeze tv stations which were on the air at that time have almost without exception changed power, antenna height, or channel position and therefore the 1952 data can no longer pertain to television coverage. The NCS and SAMS studies were a source of data showing the percent of homes that listened to radio stations, day and night, at least once a week. These percents cannot be used as an absolute measure of the percent of homes which actually listen to the station on any regular basis. Subconsciously, program popularity must have entered into the respondent's mind when he listed the stations listened to regularly. Therefore, the figure derived from the study may be inflated or deflated depending upon whether the station carried programs that were uppermost in the respondent's mind at the time the ballot was filled in. These figures also cannot be used as an indication of the share of audience of the stations in a particular county as they do not relate to any one program but merely to total unduplicated listening within a given period. Many will say that television has affected radio to such an extent in the last three years that the 1952 figures are no longer valid. However, we believe that if the NCS and SAMS data is used to define coverage areas rather than to determine the actual size of the station audience, there is no reason why the 1952 data is still not true today. The levels of station listening may have changed in the last three years, but the area in which people can and do listen to the station should not have changed, all other things being equal. However, the 1952 data is out-of-date for stations which have changed power and frequency, have had a change in network affiliation or for new stations which have come on the air in the last three years. For these stations, it is necessary to develop coverage patterns based on an engineering concept. We like to consider the 0.5 millivolt area as the primary coverage area of a radio station. This must be calculated according to its power, frequency, and the ground conductivity in its service area. Many stations have these maps available. When there is no map available, it is necessary for the agency to calculate the coverage area themselves. If one of these stations has a map showing measured field strength (popularly called "proof of performance" maps) on the 0.5 millivolt, we prefer to use it since it shows the actual rather than the theoretical engineering coverage area for the station. There are two other types of coverage data which all of us are plagued with from time to time. These are mail maps and miscellaneous coverage claims by the stations. Usually these are put out by overzealous station managers or promotion people who are trying to claim all outdoors for their station to be able to get more business. Mail maps, we believe, do not indicate a station's true coverage area. On any type of mail promotion, it has always been felt that those who write in (whether it be just a fan letter or whether it be for a special offer) are a different type of person than the majority of listeners and are therefore not typical of the entire audience of the station. Further,