Making Points with Your Clientele

From Inside Radio (8/21/08): "Posting becomes reality in Houston.

"Radio One's Houston stations will present advertisers with detailed weekly reports to monitor performance of their commercials within the next few months. The company has been developing its own "Accountability One" software since April and has created a system that will merge Arbitron's PPM data with Marketron data."

Here’s the dirty little secret about these ratings services: They’re all guess work.
Granted, PPM is a little more precise than the old-style diary-return method…but at the end of the day, it’s still just guess work.

Arbitron calls people up and asks them to monitor their Radio listening habits. If they say yes (meaning, they don’t have anything better to do), Arbitron sends them a little black box that they must wear on their belt: The PPM, or Portable People Meter. The PPM “listens” to the stations the respondent tunes to in the car, at work, at home, etc. At the end of the survey interval, the participant must put his PPM in a cradle, from which it transmits the collected data.
Arbitron may have up to 1,700 people wearing their PPM’s, tracking their radio listening habits, and using that information to extrapolate audience numbers for the entire universe of people who listen to the Radio in Houston. Think about that for a minute: 1,700 persons representing the listening habits of over 4-million people.

Against that wispy premise, Radio One is now going to attempt to monitor the performance of their ad campaigns.

What if you had a more precise way of measuring not only who responds to your marketing messages, but also did not charge you until a customer transaction occurred?

Impossible, you say?
Not so.

This is a shameless plug for a program I am now repping in Houston for KPRC-TV’s web marketing initiative, Click 2 Houston Rewards. Starting next month, viewers may register their existing major-brand bank card, which when used at any participating merchant, will result in the accumulation of Rewards Points. The Rewards Points may be redeemed for prizes or gift cards on the Click 2 Houston Rewards site.

On the merchant side, however, the precision is amazing: You will know who your customers are, where they live, how often they visit your store…and you can incentivize their visits by the level of Rewards Points you offer for shopping your place. A point costs you only 2-cents. If you reward 4-points for each dollar spent, you’re essentially investing $1,000 to generate $12,500 in sales. The beauty of this plan is, you’re not charged until the sale takes place.

I like that math a whole lot better than smoke-and-mirrors guess work of these rating services. Wanna know more?

Contact me here.