CurrieNorden (www.currienorden.com) developed an online content tester called ‘Ultimate Air Check’. Using this tool, you can upload audio from your radio show, choose your audience, then get them to listen and rate the audio clip every five seconds. This produces a moving graph that charts the different responses to the content as the audio plays. It therefore allows you to make observations about what works and what doesn’t on radio. To illustrate this – the guys played several clips from breakfast shows around the world and told us theirobservations.
BBC RADIO 1 (England). Presenter: Nick Grimshaw Clip: Jack Black interview
The big observation during this clip was that despite the introduction of A-lister Jack Black, there was a slight dip in ratings. Perhaps this is because Jack Black isn’t as appealing to Radio 1’s younger 16-24 audience anymore.
CAPITAL FM (London) Presenter: Dave Berry. We heard a feature where a listener sings down the phone on air. The moving chart showed it was pretty unsuccessful in engaging the listener. However – a big thing to note was that listeners whose favourite station is Capital didn’t respond as negatively to this feature. This illustrates the need to ensure you don’t just research your regular listeners – you need to research a wide range to give you a full picture.
702 ABC Breakfast (Sydney) Presenter: Robbie Buck. Here, ratings went massively up during a guest’s story. Good stories = good radio. This was underlined by the drop in ratings when the presenter interrupted the story flow.
Z100 (New York)Presenter: Elvis Duran. During this clip, a wife pranked her husband on air – he received a phone call from a computer repair store tellinghim the reason for his laptop breaking was his massive porn consumption…. Obviously, the victim was not impressed!!
A couple of interesting observations from this clip – the whole segment had more appeal for men than women. Men enjoy the ‘bully-victim’ relationship more than women it appears. The peak in ratings came during the reveal (the wife admitted she was pranking him!). Cleverly, the segment finished immediately after. It was the longest clip we heard during the session, but was VERY entertaining.
It’s not quantity that matters, it is quality.
