Look Ma, No Data!

Being a radio guy, I was interested in this article from today's issue of Tom Taylor's excellent daily radio e-rag:

Who’s really #1 in Seattle? That would be public radio's KUOW.

This is a fascinating exercise in almost any Arbitron-rated market – unearthing the 12+ shares for the popular non-com stations and plugging them into the Arbitron-released rankings alongside the commercial stations. In the case of Seattle, the Post-Intelligencer’s Bill Virgin did that and discovers that the University of Washington-owned KUOW (94.9) would handily beat out CHR KUBE (93.3) as the #1 station in the Winter book.

You get similar results in other markets that have a high percentage of college graduates (and often, colleges). In Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, WUNC (91.5) regularly appears at or near the top of the heap in the Research Triangle. Ditto for KQED in San Francisco. And don’t even ask about Ann Arbor.

This parallels my own in-depth survey, undertaken at great cost - namely, I had to put two hours of my life on hold - conducted yesterday when I received a visit from Justin the Cable Guy. (If you must know, my digital cable box showed NO DATA after 4 PM every day - a total bitch if you want to see who's on "Ellen" - and the PPV screens took longer to load than it takes NetFlix to arrive in the mail.)

Anyway, Justin - probably not his real name - hey, do you remember the name of your cable guy? - noticed the KIIS-FM bus card in my office and struck up a conversation about radio ... how's Rick Dees doing? (Hanging by a thread at MOVIN, thanks for asking) ... what about Ellen K, the total babe? (A very nice lady, probably thanks to her Iowa roots) ...

NOT JUSTIN, BUT PRETTY CLOSE

I should mention that Justin could have been from Central Casting - part Larry the Other Cable Guy, a dash of Jim Carrey - burley, goateed, probably stops off for a Frosty One with the other Cable Guys after work.

So after asking his polite questions about KIIS-FM - about the answers to which he could care less, judging from the fact that he kept asking the same questions - he told me he listened mainly to NPR.

That would have taken the wind out of the sails of lesser radio mortals, but it just so happens that I went to school with, roomed with, and got the first radio job for Robert Siegel, so I could continue to impress and amaze Justin. The Cable Guy. (Boy, that's depressing.)

Justin went on to tell me that he had satellite for a while because of Howard Stern (right with you there, buddy - my wife used to do massage therapy on Howard's mother, and Howard beat my ass in Hartford; it would have been more embarrassing all the way around if those situations had been reversed) ... but he only listened in the car and doesn't commute that much these days.

So there you have it: an empirical validation (n=1) of the findings of that fly-by-night outfit, Arbitron. Hey, I just did what most of us consultants do anyway - dress up personal, anecdotal experience as "research" to sell our points of view. Only this time, the sample came to me.