Why This Station Billed a MILLION $$ in Its FIRST WEEK!

Advertisers love engaged audiences – they’re more attentive and receptive to the advertiser’s message.

There’s a radio format Alan Burns and Associates is advocating for and that advertisers love because it generates a very highly engaged audience. In fact, they love it so much that one of the more recent converts to this format billed over a million dollars in its first week on the air.

There are now five stations in this format; in Canada it’s called “Conversation Radio” (we call it “Social FM” but either term works). With the help of Coleman Insights we researched the audience of one of them and found its listeners to be in love with it – in fact, it converts an incredible 54% of its cume to P1s. 

Then we asked advertisers and buyers about it.

NOW Radio in Edmonton was the first in the format, and Carol Paul with Edmonton’s Creative Promotional Marketing says:

“They’re usually number one in audience, and it’s a great value since It’s a very engaged audience. Plus their qualitative stats are excellent.”

The senior planner at one of Canada’s biggest radio buyers told us:

“Conversational/Social stations like NOW Radio in Edmonton and Today in Calgary have extremely engaged audiences and they are on every single one of our buys. They are always more expensive than everyone else but they’re worth it.”

That planner asked us to withhold his/her full name because he didn’t want to give the Conversational/Social FM stations any more negotiating ammo than they already have!

Audience engagement is so highly prized that one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, Dentsu Media, has developed its own metric to use in factoring engagement into its buys. Dentsu’s US CEO Doug Rozen says they are shifting from traditional CPM to what he calls “Effective Attentive CPM.”

Pierre Bouvard, Cumulus/Westwood’s Chief Insights Officer, notes that “people pay for attention, thus you can charge a higher CPM.” He also points out that in radio, spoken-word formats generate the highest attentiveness (see Pierre’s excellent blog post about this study for proof). That’s partly why six of the ten highest-billing stations in the US are in spoken word formats like News and Sports (another factor of course is more inventory).

One of the reasons Conversational/Social FM’s audience is so engaged is that it includes a higher amount of spoken word than any other music format; another is that the format is built on audience-generated content. The audience is the star of the station, so the audience pays close attention.

The stations that have aired Conversational/Social FM for two years or more are almost always #1 in PPM ratings with men, women, and/or adults 25-54. They have their market’s largest audience and it’s highly engaged.

Would you like to:

-   have your market’s largest audience?

-   be able to sell it at a higher CPM?

-    and have buyers like the one quoted above say your station is “always more expensive than everyone else but they’re worth it?”  

If so, let’s discuss how and why Conversational/Social FM works, and whether it makes sense for your cluster or company. Shoot me an email or a call with a good time to talk.

Have an engaged day!