Coleman Insights re-releases PPM study

President/COO Warren Kurtzman

Coleman Insights has re-released the online presentation of "Real PPM Panelists Tell All," the company’s 2008 study that provided insights into the perceptions and behavior of Arbitron’s PPM panelists. Visitors to www.ColemanInsights.com/ppm can now access a self-guided, multimedia presentation of the study’s findings, as well as other studies the company has released under its "Mapping the DNA of PPM" series. This series is a  comprehensive look to date at how PPM reports the responses of radio audiences to different programming elements.

Coleman Insights President/COO Warren Kurtzman tells RBR-TVBR the reasons this has been re-released after two years:
“When we originally released the study we put this online presentation our site. Our site went through a big redesign last year and we didn’t put this back up. Then, there was all of this attention paid to the Ben Fong-Torres article that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle a couple weeks ago and we were just struck, by not only reading the article, but also things people were posting on blogs and comments on blogs about points that we thought were pretty thoroughly covered in this two-year old research study. It made us realize that probably a lot of people didn’t pay close attention to the study when it was initially released because for so many people, PPM was this thing off in the future. So we thought that by getting it back in front of people it would be more helpful to those who are now dealing with the realities of PPM on a daily basis.”

What are some of the key takeaways that readers will find that may have never seen it before?
“There are two halves," he told us. "One addresses the panelist experience. We concluded that in general, respondents had a pretty positive experience as panelists. Also, a lot of the things that Arbitron has been telling us really does happen as a part of the panelist experience. It’s not perfect – there are some issues with people sometimes forgetting their meter or not carrying it with them when they go to a special occasion. But overall, we felt like there was a very positive story for Arbitron in terms of panelist compliance.”

Kurtzman adds, “The second half of the study, which to us, given what we do for a living) is much more interesting, is about what we’ve learned about the relationship between panelists’ perceptions of what they listen to, and what the meter actually captures. The most important thing that came out of that was our determination there are essentially three kinds of cume listening that are measured in PPM. One is called Intentional Cume – the listening that people know they do, intend to do, and likely were pretty good about reporting under the Diary system. Another is called Incidental Listening, where people get exposed to radio stations that they maybe didn’t intend to listen to, but they get exposed enough to the point that they do recall doing it and they can explain why a meter may have captured that listening. That’s something that probably doesn’t get captured much under Diary measurement. The third is Invisible Cume, which is exposure to radio stations that the panelist has absolutely no explanation for –doesn’t recall ever being exposed to those radio stations. That was certainly something that was never reported under diary measurement.”

He concluded by telling us that the important thing they learned in the study is that really the only one that your radio station has a lot of control over is Intentional Cume.

Tweet