Written by Brian Lister, Radio Consultant
The great thing about radio listening experience is that it is ephemeral and intangible. It is the theatre of the mind. This is its very strength in the busy multi-media age in which we live – radio is the only mass medium you can actively consume while you are safely doing something else!
Only in the field of research does this wonderful lack of visibility and physical existence cause us great concern. How can you measure the impact of something so individual and personal, particularly where the delivery mechanism has traditionally provided no instant feedback?
Down the years there have been many attempts to set a “gold-standard” for radio audience measurement. In the UK it used to be very simple. If the BBC wanted to know how many people were listening to its radio programmes it stopped a few in the street and asked them what they remembered listening to the previous day. It was relatively cheap, it was straightforward to undertake the research and process the results in-house. If a wide enough cross-section of people were stopped in enough locations it was possible to scale-up the results to give a good idea of the relative popularity of different programmes and it gave the BBC audience reaction which it needed to justify its public service role.
But it was not really practical to use such random interviews to build up a detailed picture of when people listened to different stations on different days and for how long. From the start of commercial radio in 1973 it was clear that the new industry needed more precise information about times and durations of listening to convince advertisers to spend money. The Joint Industry Committee for Radio Audience Research (JICRAR) chose the “listening diary” methodology, using a booklet in which each radio station in a given area was given a column and people marked which stations they had been listening to each quarter of an hour through the day.
Inevitably, given the methodological differences between the two methods of audience measurement, the BBC and the commercial radio sector often produced conflicting results.
Continue on to Brian’s piece ‘all about Rajar‘
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