Resolved: Ad Supported Radio Is Nearing A New Golden Age

Consider this a debate with only one side represented. The issue is radio and if this were an old school classical debate — one that strictly followed the time-honored protocols for such things — one debater or debate team would make the case for radio’s attaining a new golden age and an opponent would present the case against it.

“But who,” in the words of the politicos who stage the quadrennial multi-candidate press conferences inaccurately billed as presidential debates, ” needs classic debate rules?” Who, indeed? Surely not us. So we’re going to present only one set of arguments, those that support the resolution.

Do we have any remorse about excluding those “against” from the exercise? Not really. Since the start of the recession the against point of view has been more than adequately represented by Chapter 11 filings, dismal financials and depressed share prices.

Truth is, the majority — if not virtually all — of the tangibles argue against our debate resolution. But, tangibles, especially when you’re dealing with the public’s taste in entertainment, often don’t count for very much. Who would have thought, for example, that cobbled up filler intended to plug prime time schedules during the 1988 TV writer’s strike would have spawned a reality show craze that’s still going strong today.

With that in mind, here’s our intangibles-based argument for an impending radio renaissance.

– Item: Internet Radio

Internet radio, its royalty battles finally behind it, has a unique ability to deliver its signal to almost everywhere via computers , phones, network music players (Sonos, etc.), personal music players and even some game consoles. If it is the future of radio, the future may be nearer than many of us think.

According to Arbitron, almost 13 percent of all Americans over the age of 12 — approximately 33 million people — tuned into one or more internet radio stations each week of 2008 and the vast majority of them were exposed to commercials in the form of inline audio ads and/or interactive graphical ads.
What’s more, thanks to advances in Geo-Location technology, internet radio stations can now offer advertisers both national- and local-market ad coverage.

Two recent example from the files of the Pandora i-radio service:

1. McDonald’s running a national campaign which featured, among other spots, a commercial devoted to telling listeners how to best use Internet radio to maximum its entertainment and information benefits.

2. Whole Foods Market sponsoring 15-second audio spots promoting their lunch menus to listeners whose IP addresses placed them within seven miles of one of the chain’s San Francisco Bay Area stores. One can argue the mapping — wouldn’t some people be willing to drive eight, nine or even ten miles for a good, healthy lunch? — without diminishing the value of internet radio’s ability to get that granular.

Item: HD Radio

Yes, it’s developing at a snail’s pace, but so did FM, which was hampered by exactly the same factors that are holding HD back — a severe programming deficit, incompatible hardware, lackadaisical consumer and industry support, and technological issues centered on limited transmission range.

The FM snail proved, in the end, to be considerably faster than the AM hare. Likewise, there’s no reason why HD shouldn’t begin cantering — if not exactly galloping — once the broadcasting industry figures out how to effectively exploit it, radio listeners become aware of it, and advertisers begin to realize how it can refine audience targeting and improve radio budget ROI.

A simple example should suffice. Mythical radio station WRYS (We Rock You Silly) has been programming top 40 or top 100 rock and roll for five years. Moving into HD, it programs oldies rock on one sideband and album tracks on another.

Advertiser A wants to reach everyone interested in rock, he buys all three WRYS feeds, probably at a better rate than buying three discrete rock stations with differing formats. If advertiser B wants to reach a somewhat older subset of rock and rollers, he buys only the oldies channel, hopefully ensuring that each “M” in his CPM will have a more favorable adult/juvenile ratio. Advertiser C, who wants to pitch hardcore, bad-to-the-bone headbangers, buys the alternate rock feed plus, maybe, a small schedule on the main channel.

– Item: Personal Music Players & Cell Phones

Does the iPod generation listen to radio? Possibly not four or five years ago when the rush to downloadable music resembled a feeding frenzy with threshing shark and barracuda packs mindlessly attacking and ingesting everything that made a sound except CDs and radio. But that was then. Today is now and both iPods and virtually all other high- and mid-range PMP models sport integrated FM tuners. Some fully featured players even integrate Wi-Fi to provide internet radio access to denizens of libraries and Starbucks.

The impressive factoid here is that radio capability, according to many consumer electronic product reviewers and trends analysts, was added to these devices in response to consumer demand. As far as most OEM music-player makers were concerned, the onboard portable music player tuner had long ago accompanied its host — the cassette tape-playing Walkman — into eternal oblivion.

Internet radio streaming has also become something of a “must-have” feature on smart phones and media phones. Empowered by software integrated into the phone as a standard feature or added by the user as an iPhone, Android, or Pre app, Internet Radio is becoming a highly popular alternative for accessing media without over-filling a phone’s memory card or fooling around with computer/USB file transfers.

How pervasive is this trend? According to a study by radio audience tracking report provider Bridge Ratings LLC, the number of Americans streaming radio through mobile telephones will match or surpass those subscribing to satellite radio in the not-very-distant future.

Which brings us to ….

–Item: Satellite Radio Stagnation

Based on its first three 2009 quarterly reports, Sirius XM is on track to end 2009 with 4 percent fewer subscribers than it had last December 31. That’s a full 4 percent erosion of their installed subscriber base, not a 4 percent decline in growth rate.

Though Sirius execs have tried to lay some of the blame off on poor sales of new automobiles, that spin seems hard to swallow since we’re talking about listeners who proactively cancelled existing subscriptions, not people who declined to buy new ones.

The good news for the ad-supported radio business is that it’s logical — though not empirically provable — that the people opting off the Sirius XM pay-for-play merry go round are still listening to radio. They’re just tuning into terrestrial or internet stations instead.

Whoops! Times seems to be up. The debate is over. The judges will now deliberate and declare the winner.

Wait a sec? What judges?

You, of course, and you and you and you and, most of all, posterity will determine whether the resolution that ad-supported radio is on the cusp of a new golden age will be affirmed or denied.

In the meantime, while we’re waiting for the verdict, we can all click on Are You Sitting Comfortably for a warm, friendly, time-tunnel tour of a world in which radio was king and the prospects for its reign seemed to stretch forward into forever.

New Media vs. Old: Viva La Difference (If You Can Find One)

The first part of the expression “there’s nothing new under the sun” is about as common as a cliché can be. The full quote, almost universally attributed to turn-of-the-20th Century journalistic gadfly Ambrose Bierce, is less well known. To wit: There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don’t know.

Is what almost all of us relentlessly refer to as “new media” really new under the sun in Bierce’s sense of the phrase? Or is it something old that we may have simply forgotten.

Jim Spanfeller, who presumably learned quite a bit about the subject in his most recent past lives as chairman of the IAB and CEO of Forbes.com, seemed to be backing Bierce in an August 24th post on PaidContent.org.

“The web has advantages in providing a platform for advertisers,” Spanfeller wrote. “But the notion that it is some sort of new animal entirely has grown out of a variety of misconceptions that have worked to radically slow the eventual migration of ever-larger advertising budgets online.”

Spanfeller (and Bierce) have a point. A very good point, actually, since it can be easily and convincingly argued that the Web is nothing more or less than a content delivery system. The latest in a long line of technologies marked by such innovations as cave paintings, movable type, rotary presses, radio, motion pictures, and television.

This argument appeals to many because, among other things, it refutes the late Marshall McLuhan’s pronouncement — an anathema to creatives everywhere for more than 40 years — that the medium is the message.

On the other hand, it can be equally well argued that an advertising medium which allows buyers to purchase a “spot” by bidding on a particular word or phrase that a potential customer may use to describe a product or service is a very new animal indeed. As is a medium which allows a reader to click on a cosmetic ad and instantly change the color of the model’s eye shadow.

What about the other end of the Bierce equation? Are there lots of old things we don’t know or no longer remember well enough to learn from?

The definition of “lots” is, of course, subjective, but Jim Spanfeller does cite at least one. Noting that remnant ad selling on the Internet is based on liquidation pricing using a “demand fulfillment metric” model pioneered by the airlines, he describes “the fact that we’re relying on methods developed by an industry — the airline business — that has to date not made any money in the aggregate” as “scary.”

Another old advertising “thing,” though not one cited by Spanfeller, is the concept of visibility.

It takes, for example, a person with average hand/eye coordination approximately one-tenth of a second to hunt down and click the “skip this welcome (aka advertising) screen” button at Jim Spanfeller’s alma mater (http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml) — three-quarters to two seconds if you stop to read the “Thought of the Day.”

Is the ability to skip past an ad quickly an entirely new animal?

Not really. Not at all, actually. Readers have always been able to turn magazine pages to avoid ads. And legions of TiVo viewers are flashing by commercials like mad despite all the pious studies (similar to those which used to say that most men bought “Playboy” for the interviews) “proving” that most people use DVRs to time-shift (a necessary perquisite to fast-forwarding through the commercials).

What’s different with “new media” kill buttons is that you don’t have to consciously see the ads in order to off them. Before deciding you want to skip a magazine ad by flipping the page, you have to look at it for at least an instant. And since the demise of ReplayTV and its commercial-skip technology, you pretty much have to watch commercials go by as you Tivo past them or miss part of the program content as well. Given most DVRs’ rather stodgy maximum fast-forward speed, sponsor names and even key selling points are always visible, albeit briefly.

“Tuning out” (since we’ve already quoted Bierce and McLuhan, we might as well throw in one of Timothy Leary’s favorite nonsense phrases) ads such as those on the Forbes welcome page is different because it can be done with figurative blinkers on. You see the Flash start to run, your eyes automatically refocus to notice only the close button and, voila, the ad’s gone and you’re on a Forbes content page.

Have we at last discovered a “new animal entirely” — something that might well be called invisi-advertising?

Turns out we haven’t. All we’ve done is “rediscover” subliminal messaging, which in 1898 was described by Dr. Edward W. Scripture as something “not ’seen’ in the sense of ‘noticed’ … yet seen in the sense of being present in the field of vision.”

Does unintentional subliminal advertising in new media work any better than the deliberate subliminal messages embedded in some TV commercials prior to the FCC’s banning the practice in 1973 despite pyramids of evidence that the messages were totally ineffective?

If it does, that will indeed be something new.

Is The Hispanic Market Where The Action Is?

Since every market at every moment is acting and/or reacting to some internal or external stimulus, this may appear to be a hard question to answer. Especially in the media-buying space, where the pace of a genetically bipolar industry gets particularly frenetic every time the winds of change puff the globe off its axis and toward either the manic or depressive side of its personality.

On the other hand, maybe the question “is the Hispanic market where the action is” isn’t really difficult at all. Perhaps it just depends on how you define “action.”

Recently survey results from such major players as Experian Simmons, Univision, and Forrester Research attracted considerable interest — if not actual “action” — by revealing that many Hispanic consumers have a more positive view of the current economy than, on average, non-Hispanics. Even more surprising, perhaps, was evidence that Hispanics are more receptive than non-Hispanics to cutting-edge mobile distribution platforms for advertiser-supported entertainment.

Based on an analysis of 65 weekly surveys conducted from Q1 2008 through Q2 2009, Experian SimmonsSM and Univision reported that Hispanic consumers have reacted less negatively to post-September ‘08 economic deterioration than non-Hispanic consumers.

Specifically, the report stated that since the “meltdown” week of September 29:

• Hispanic consumer confidence levels have continued to be more than ten percent higher than that of non-Hispanics.
• Over one-third of Hispanic consumers, compared to only one-quarter of non-Hispanics, are optimistic about their personal financial prospects for the coming 52 weeks.
• The percentage of Hispanics expressing confidence about the performance of the overall U.S. economy over the next year is significantly higher (29% – 21%) than the percentage of non-Hispanics.

Interesting findings. But are they simply proof of La Agencia de Orci founder/CEO Hector Orci’s oft-quoted observation that “being Hispanic means you’re optimistic” or a call to action? Perhaps these three additional statistics reported in the Experian/Univision study provide some basis for a conclusion:

• Hispanics are 38 percent more likely to buy advertised products than non-Hispanics.
• Hispanics consistently shop more frequently than non-Hispanics.
• Twice as many Hispanics (31% vs. 15%) are willing to pay premium prices to buy branded prescription drugs instead of generics.

Considered as a whole, the results of this 65-week study are arguably a call to ad-placement action. A message that, particularly in hard times, the “resilience of the Hispanic consumer,” in Univision Executive Vice-President of Corporate Research Ceril Shagrin’s words, is worth a second or even third look when near-term media plans are on the table.

And, according to a recent Forrester North American Technographics Benchmark Survey, some of that ad-placement “action” might productively be targeted to New Media.

Among other things, Forrester reported that:

• The percentage of Hispanic Web surfers who watch streaming video and save downloadable video content is higher than that of non-Hispanic Web users.
• Indicating a high degree of comfort with advanced technology, the percentage of Spanish-speakers watching television programs and video clips on mobile multimedia devices such as Smartphones is also higher than that of non-Hispanic users

Regardless of how you choose to interpret the results of these surveys, one conclusion is inescapable. The Hispanic consumer market, despite being in the midst of its adopted country’s worst recession in 80 years, is a vibrant, rapidly growing, and increasingly sophisticated giant. Sleeping it is not.

The New NetCosts: Deeper Data For A More Demanding Market

“Advertisers want to get the right value and have a proper perspective with what’s going on in the economy.”
– Donna Speciale, President, Investment and Activation, MediaVest USA, speaking at Media Magazine’s 2009 Outfront Conference

Frankly, we couldn’t agree more. While value analysis has always been a critical element in media planning, finding a “proper perspective” takes on substantially increased importance — and becomes vastly more difficult — in times of economic turmoil. In our opinion, attaining a reality-based perspective on network campaign cost-benefit ratios today requires a tool that paints the CPM/CPP landscape in narrower strokes than previously deliverable.

Which is one key reason we recently implemented a major revision of NetCosts that adds some things new, improves a few things old, borrows one thing from the past, and tracks a few things — a shrinking marketplace and lower Upfront pricing projections, among others — blue.

If you’re an existing NetCosts subscriber, you’ve probably noticed NetCosts’ faster data access and processing speeds and you may already be working with some of its new capabilities. But just in case you haven’t had time to look fully “under the hood,” here’s a quick rundown.

New Reporting Options:

– Share of Market column, Market Share by Vendor, and Vendor Type data added to the Pacing Report

– Quarterly Broadcast & Calendar Season CPM and Ratings Report, Total Day CPM and Ratings and Include No Charge Units options added to CPM Report

– Average Prices Paid Displayed By Vendor Per and Daypart data added to Market Analysis Report

Improved Reporting & Usability Features

– Total Market Summary By Vendor repositioned at top of Pacing Report for at-a-glance viewing of current and previous year-to-date market spending

– Select All option in the Time Period Analysis Report eliminates necessity to individually select programs to check data on a vendor’s total activity within a given date range.

– Measurable improvement in system response and processing speed due to advanced optimization of SQAD’s more than $80 billion database of actual advertising buys.

Restored Feature

Hispanic Market CPMs and ratings have been restored to the CPM Report after intensive study and testing to mitigate anomalies caused by inaccurate delineation between Hispanic and general population ratings.

A Few Things Blue

– As we commented in a subscriber letter prior to the May 4 release of the new NetCosts, “NetCosts is the only Real Cost intelligence for national TV with contributors providing real buy data representing more than 40 percent of all TV spending. We strive to ensure that the data is accurate (and) reliable ….”

Note carefully the words “accurate and reliable.” There is no sugar-coated data in NetCosts or any other SQAD Report. Everything we release is processed with precise mathematical algorithms; none of it is filtered through either rose-colored or, conversely, dark-tinted glasses.

That being the case, it’s almost inevitable that in times like these, when the market is down and inventory is up, NetCosts will provide media sellers at least a bit of reinforcement for any blues they may already have.

What NetCosts — past and present — really is, is nothing more or less than dead accurate numbers reliably refined and reported. The kind of numbers that can be trusted to help all advertising stakeholders — buyers and sellers, agencies and broadcasters, top dogs and underdogs — place a fair, defensible value on a deal.

If Most Of The Market’s Down, Why Are Some CPPs Up?

It’s the kind of paradox that used to drive the normally sanguine science officer of the Starship Enterprise inexorably toward mutiny. An affront to logic so far beyond a simple Vulcan’s comprehension as to become intolerable even for a rigorously trained and superbly disciplined cyber-seadog.

The Super Bowl and the inauguration are over. Major traditional sectors of the advertising market — automotive and financial services, to name two — are shadows of their former selves.

Very pale shadows, in many cases … unless one counts such depression-era phenoms as 1-800 gold teeth and broken watch scavengers as members of the financial services industry.

TV ratings for most demographics in major spot markets are way down and inventory is substantially up.

And so, in a surprising number of instances, are CPP and CPM. Yes, up as in higher. With the consumer economy still in the doldrums (another monthly dive in Majap shipments — 14 percent according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers — was announced as this was being written), many advertisers seem to be spending more per head to reach potential customers than they were before the fall (literally and figuratively) of 2008.

How illogical is that?

Quite possibly not as illogical as it seems. Before considering the logic, let’s run a few numbers.

What we’ve charted is the percentage difference between the two quarters for three New York target groups: A25-54; A 18-49; and W 25-54. Of the 60 data cells, 22 percent of the total show an increase. If we look at just the 20 cells reporting CPP, however, we see an increase in 40 percent of those cells.

Taken alongside the fact that there isn’t a single example of CPP going up in conjunction with a rise in ratings, it’s clear that in most instances where we see significant CPP increases the ratings estimates have decreased faster than the reductions in those for cost per spot.

The most dramatic, though atypical example, can be found in the daytime A 25-54 segment, were cost per spot actually went up 10 percent despite a 16 percent decline in ratings estimates. Is it any surprise that the sum of fewer viewers plus higher prices equaled a 32 percent spurt in CPP?

More typically, CPP and ratings estimates both declined, with the latter sagging at a slower pace.

Conversely, if we look at the three cells where ratings estimates rose — A 25-54 prime, A 18-49 early fringe, and A 18-49 prime — we find that CPP decreased by 22 percent, 17 percent and 18 percent respectively.

Based on this, the premise that advertisers are spending more per viewer is not all that compelling. While it is true in some segments, the evidence is irrefutable that CPP is simply settling into the new economic reality later than other indicators … which isn’t all that illogical considering typical budgeting and buying schedules.

Looked at from the other end of the metrics-scope, we can also spot some real values in the chart, notably among the demographic groups most likely to spending an evening out less often in 2009 than in 2008.

Prime time estimated ratings in those two sectors — A 25-54 and A 18-49 — were up an average of 19.5 percent and CPP declined an average of 20 percent. That, to steal a phrase from the sportscasting fraternity, is a 40 percent turnaround.

Two other important metrics to study are quarter-to-quarter efficiencies and year-over-year changes between quarters. For example, SQAD reports for Q4 2007 vs Q1 2008 showed a CPM decline of 14 percent for Adults 25-54 across all 210 DMAs. By comparison, SQAD data for Q4 2008-Q1 2009 revealed a drop of 26 percent among the same group.

Another factor affecting the perception that Spot CPP/CPM has been higher in Q1 than it should be under the circumstances has as much to do with the political calendar as it does with the state of the economy.

The reality is that a tremendous amount of ad revenue was pumped into the Spot market in the five Q4 weeks of the most lavishly financed election campaign in history. Coming off that unusually robust quarter it isn’t surprising — let alone illogical — for the percentage decrease in total spending between Q4 2008 and Q4 2009 to be significantly greater than normal.

It’s equally unsurprising that rapid and unusual decreases in spending driven by such factors as the end of an election cycle and a sudden flat-lining of the economy would more quickly impact prices and volume than it would CPP or CPM, numbers somewhat insulated from sudden shock by the amount of buys already in the pipeline at any given moment.

The bottomline is that the accuracy of the transaction-based data in SQAD reports, if not entirely immune to rampaging bears, bulls or presidential candidates, is subject at most to an occasional hiccup, never a heart attack.

Our reports are based on what advertisers actually spend and are equally valid whether the commercials are promoting CFG (Cash For Gold) or AIG (no need to spell out who they are.)

In good times or bad, money is the gold-standard against which all other value assessments must be measured. In a free-market economy such as ours, that’s one thing that’s irrefutably logical.

Did the grandfather of media ratings cook the books?

Probably not, but owners of radio stations in the approximately 30 cities surveyed by Arch Crossley almost 80 years ago can be forgiven if they sometimes wondered about it.

Crossley, as everyone knows, more or less invented the ratings game by telephoning radio listeners and creating what eventually came to be known as the Crossley ratings. Not as well remembered is the fact that he honed his techniques polling on behalf of major advertisers like Eastman Kodak and Clabber Girl baking powder in the late 1920s and created the industry-wide “Crossleys” for the Association of National Advertisers’ not-for-profit Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting subsidiary.

In other words, the Crossley’s were owned — lock, stock and dayparts (all four of them) — by a consortium of advertisers. Agencies were admitted to the Crossley “club” early; shortly after it began issuing ratings in 1930. However, vendors — i.e. CBS, NBC and other broadcasters — were not allowed to become full subscribers until 1937.

ANA ownership was one of the reasons, along with differences in methodology, the Crossleys were superseded by the independently generated Hooper ratings in the mid-1940s. But before shuffling off to the Big Pocketpiece in the sky, they’d established two crucial audience measurement modalities that exist to this day: Dayparts and audience share.

Claude Hooper and his associates, who in early years included Dr. George Gallup, refined Crossley’s definition of share as a gross percentage of radio owners tuned to a particular station by factoring in such elements as the number of radios in actual use and the number of listeners in front of each radio to come up with he called “percent of listeners” shares. Later versions of his Hooperatings also went beyond Crossley’s daypart reports by breaking morning, evening and late-night audiences down into categories defined by age and gender.

In addition to his pioneering work in applying demographic research to broadcasting, Hooper invented one other thing that is still alive and well, though not quite as healthy as it once was: The rating point. A statistic so popular that radio networks sometimes used Hooper Points, rather than ad revenues, as a measuring stick in negotiating contracts with their top stars.

If there’s any point at all in revisiting this history (which is highly debatable), it’s to remind ourselves that everything has its time and place. That said, it’s fair to ask if Hooper’s venerable ratings points, which have been so useful to virtually all broadcast advertising stakeholders for so long, have finally run out of time and lost their place in calculating advertising values.

Probably not completely. Though the 4As is debating the future of cost-per-point even as this is being written, CPP is simply too intuitive a way to compare the relative value of a spot on the Manhattan, N.Y. (pop. 1,500,000) local news with one placed in Manhattan, KS (pop. 51,000).

That said, CPM’s universality — postulated on the concept that populations of a given age, gender, income level, etc. are pretty much alike — has made CPM the current king of the multi-platform campaign hill.

How long it will stay there is another question. CPM is an incredibly effective way of comparing apples to apples, but it exists in a multi-fruited universe. Is a person watching or listening to a broadcast commercial really a direct clone of someone in the same socio-economic group who’s browsing a website, pondering a print ad, viewing a ballpark billboard, or opting out of the whole ad-driven matrix by settling in for an HBO-evening?

Perhaps, but more likely perhaps not. If they’ve done nothing else, the Web’s more than 100,000,000 discrete sites (Netcraft Web Server Survey, 2007) have divvied the demographic pie up into untold thousands of nanoslices. In the long run, it’s doubtful that any one-size-fits-all price-comparison tool will be flexible enough to handicap that diverse a field.

The SQAD BLOG: “Impersonal” Is Not An Option

Advertising is, according to noted author and marketing guru Courtland Bovee, “the non-personal communication of information, usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Advertising seems to have gotten a quantum degree more personal in both content (a chorus line singing “Viva Viagra”) and technology (while dancing across a 65-inch HDTV screen) in the years since Bovee first formulated his definition.

Likewise, this century’s newest advertising-delivery systems — from guerrilla marketing infiltration of forums and news groups to interactive display ads on social networking sites — can hardly be called impersonal. A person who clicks on an interactive ad is viewing the content — maybe even playing a game — on a one-to-one basis, not watching the same commercial at exactly the same instant as millions of other potential customers. Many social network and affinity-group placements can also arguably be termed “personal” because they are being delivered by a person or organization the viewer knows, thinks he knows, or at the very least, has an empathic relationship with.

A better definition of advertising, at least from an insider’s POV, might go something like this: A global battlefield replete with challenges and opportunities.

Challenges and opportunities. Every business day — all 30 or 31 of them a month — brings both. The challenges — budget management, media selection, demographic targeting, fine-tuning creative, etc. — all involve maximizing the likelihood that the campaign’s message will be, to steal a phrase from Courtland Bovee, “persuasive in nature.”

The opportunities are more situationally variable. One day might afford an opportunity to bring a new brand to life or reanimate one that’s moribund. The next may present the chance to help shatter a retailer’s Black Friday sales records.

In producing SQAD’s family of transaction-based advertising-spending reports, our challenge is to provide subscribers with accurate, reliable current CPP and CPM pricing data and forecasts in a robust, flexible format that advertisers, agencies, broadcasters and internet publishers can rely on day after day, campaign after campaign, buy after buy.

We are, in other — somewhat simplified — words, numbers people. We input vast quantities of dollar data from actual advertising buys, organize them, process them through our proprietary algorithms, and translate them into reports and worksheets that have, over the past 20 years, become the de facto standard in media-pricing metrics.

In this blog we will step out from behind the numbers and talk about our programs, plans, and philosophy in plain English, primarily using the A-Z alphabet instead of the 1-10 character set with which we’re more familiar. Here we will also engage in what we hope will be a spirited discussion of other aspects of the fascinating, frustrating, usually-but-far-from-always “persuasive” business of advertising.

In launching the SQADBlog we face the same challenge as every other blogger: Retaining your interest while staying on topic, ensuring that we set the table with food for thought rather than empty calories, giving you something – an insight, a fact, an opinion — you can’t get anywhere else.

That is the challenge. Not so strangely, the chance to give you something interesting, thoughtful and unique is also quite an opportunity.