I’ve always dreamed of throwing a wrench into the machine… and this might be my only shot. Here are 6 reasons why Radio needs to ditch PPM:
1 – You couldn’t pay me enough to carry around another device… let alone one that looks like a pager.
2 – It’s ridiculously expensive.
3 – It’s not that accurate.
4 – Peoples’ livelihoods hang in the balance of all the results.
5 – It doesn’t encode well.
6 – It kills formats.
Yet, for some reason, Radio stations lack the balls to say, “We can do better than this”.
Here’s an idea. Do your own research. Recently, Go Daddy was selling basic web hosting for $1.00 a month. In theory, your digital department, creative writers and producers can create the ads using company time and resources. So… this project could cost you literally next to nothing. Here’s how to do it.
1 - Create amazing advertising campaigns for fake businesses.
2 - Generate a 1 page website for each of these businesses including a domain.
3 - Run the ad on your radio station for 16 weeks (or however long your standard campaigns run).
4 - Track the statistic of hits on that website.
5 - Make the website look real, but when the user clicks on it, re-direct it back to the radio station website to monetize impressions of both the fake website, and the corporate website.
6 - Make a sales report showing how much traffic went to that website while running the ad campaign.
7 - Bring it to potential clients and show them rock solid digital stats (not PPM) about the amount of traffic you can send to your clients.
Yup, that’s how you get accurate statistics from antiquated media in the digital age.
Additional resources about PPM:
http://www.radioinsights.com/ppm/
https://larrygifford.wordpress.com/2015/06/11/where-is-the-outrage-over-ppm/
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/did-nielsen-kill-the-radio-star/
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Dave is CEO of Scoundrel Studios Inc. He welcomes your correspondence at