Inside Music MediaJerry Del Colliano

In the presidential election, everyone but USC/LA Times and Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) Poll got it wrong.

The media were wrong.

CNN, MSNBC – even Fox looked surprised as the night wore on.

The pundits were wrong.

The data itself was wrong.

Freakin’ Nate Silver was wrong (again) as was The New York Times Upshot among other polls.

Every single source pointed to Donald Trump as having an impossible path compared to Hillary Clinton to win the election.

All of which should concern the radio industry after yesterday’s admission by Nielsen that 8% of their PPM devices in 48 markets lost connectivity and were rendered inactive during one week of the monthly survey.

Never mind why (unless you are actually paying for this stuff), but it shows how perfectly good radio people seem to be making the same mistakes that caused the election to be called wrong.

This has riveted my attention to a big problem in radio which is that we no longer listen to our gut.

We are getting our audience all wrong.

Anyone with Millennial children knows that they don’t listen to radio, but Erica Farber says they do and so be it. Case closed.

Every good program director knows that if you don’t play the same hits over and over again then your ratings will go down (you know, the ones Nielsen calls estimates and says are not accurate).

Yet 86 million Millennials would beg to differ with the esteemed radio PDs by saying they want music discovery not the same old songs over and over.

Radio says, play the right song and they will listen.

But observe the audience and you’ll see that they don’t listen to many songs all the way through.

Radio says our data shows that if you squeeze commercials in one or two times an hour between x and y on the clock that it will be accretive to PPM ratings.

But true observers of audiences will note that no one stays around for commercials, the things that pay the bills.

Radio has formats with specific events and cues at certain times each hour because that’s how we’ve always done it, but in-demo audiences – the ones radio really needs – don’t like rules.

Our gut knows how to break the rules.

We are the best at adapting to the needs of audiences but not when we are relying on old wives tales of programmers, questionable data, research companies that are way past their prime and out of touch programmers and consultants.

So this is an invitation to you to find a way to be in Philadelphia April 5, 2017 to redefine the way we look at audiences.

That’s when we will learn to listen to our gut again.

And burn the rulebook!

The program and the lowest price that will ever be offered are here.