The 2025 Fort Wayne Radio Rating Update

The 2025 Fort Wayne Radio Rating Update

by | Mar 3, 2025 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Media, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

As a follow up on last weeks article and podcast episode, Today I’m going to share information regarding the last ratings data we have for the Fort Wayne, Indiana market pertaining to radio station listenership. This data was collected last Fall and is the most recent information we have until an update is released later this year.  Radio stations and ad agencies pay Nielsen for the data and I’m limited in what I can share publicly but my goal is to give you some insight that will either confirm your perceptions or blow them out of the water.

I have to bounce around a couple different survey data sets but all of this is specifically about radio listenership in Fort Wayne.

Using the Total Survey Area which includes 19 counties in Northeast Indiana and Northwest Ohio, I see there are a little over 900,000 people ages 12 and older living here. Over a third of them live in Allen County which includes Fort Wayne.  When I eliminate the 12 to 17 year olds, we have almost 570,000 adults in our area.

70% listen to a local radio station every week.

Less than 20% listen to satellite radio like Cirrus XM.

Only 61% are watching one of the traditional broadcast TV channels of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox networks.

Less than 20% are subscribing to our local daily newspaper.

This tells us that local radio stations still have the largest overall audience of readers, viewers and listeners compared to other local media options.

Also the perception that everyone listens to satellite radio is far from true.

Which Fort Wayne radio stations have the most listeners?

In the last rating period , just one WMEE had over 100,000 weekly listeners age 12 and older.

WMEE is owned by Federated Media, where I work.  Other Federated Media stations were in the top ten in this classification include News Talk WOWO, Country Station K105, Rock Station 989 The Bear.  The other 6 stations with the most weekly listeners age 12 and older include WBCL, WAJI, WJFX, WLDE, WXKE and WBTU.

29 stations made the entire survey.

From a business perspective, using the broad age range of 12 years old and older doesn’t make sense because teenagers are not spending much money compared to adults.

And to really take an honest look at who spends money, we should also leave out the young adults in their 20’s maybe up to age 35 or 40.  It’s not that those age demographics don’t have money, but most of it is already spoken for with college debts, rent, car payments and credit card debt eating up most of those paychecks.

Realistically, it’s when we are in our 30’s that our families are growing both in number and expenses.  However by the time adults reach around 40 they begin to have some breathing room or at least figured out how to deal with their finances on a more grown-up level.

That’s why when I talk to business owners I use the term “grown-ups” as their customers.  These are people age 35 and older.  Sometimes business owners are targeting grown-ups age 45 and older because that’s who will spend money more freely instead of the younger folks.

I give you all of that just to set you up for what I’ve been doing for years when it comes to rating data for the purposes of advertising and that is to look at the age demographics of each radio station that matches who will buy what a business is selling.

That starts with age 35+.  My station, WOWO has the most weekly listeners in that age group.

Another important number that I look at from the ratings is how much time do listeners spend listening to their favorite stations?  It’s called Time Spent Listening, or TSL and again WOWO dominates over all the other local radio stations.

From a business perspective this means  there is an increased likelihood that a WOWO listener will hear your ad compared to listeners of any other radio station.

Nielsen has a cool tool in their dashboard where I can plug in a sample schedule on WOWO of let’s say 15 ads per week and it will tell me that on other stations I need  at least 30 ads up to 45 ads to reach the same number of people, the same number of times.

Talk to me about this specifically for your business and I can run reports for you too.

While all this is good news for the people I talk with about inviting WOWO listeners to become your customers, it’s just reassurance data.

Coming up in a couple of weeks, I’ll share my simple  formula on how to buy advertising that doesn’t involve ratings or anything other than common sense and show you how you can use it to be smarter than most advertising sales people.

 

 

The Value of Radio Ratings

The Value of Radio Ratings

by | Feb 24, 2025 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Media, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

Twice a year the international recognized research company, Nielsen does a deep dive into radio listenership in the Fort Wayne Indiana metro and then legitimate radio station companies and advertising agencies can purchase access to those results.

The  part of Nielsen that measures radio is actually named Nielsen Audio which was created in 2012 when they purchased Arbitron whose company’s roots go back to the 1950’s.

In the couple of decades I’ve worked in radio advertising in Fort Wayne, I’ve worked for 3 different radio station groups that have used Arbitron (Now Nielsen) and also Eastlan Ratings.  When I joined WOWO and Federated Media in 2013, they had been an Eastlan subscriber, not Nielsen. Around 10 years later Federated Media switched back to Nielsen and that’s when Eastlan stopped servicing Fort Wayne.

I place limited credibility in any of the ratings services but they are valuable as a resource if you have an understanding of the limitations of the data.

Most rating data for radio stations is done via a survey.  Nielsen surveys 294 radio markets and 246 are recorded by participants manually logging what they listened to either in a paper survey or digital format.  However the top 48 largest markets use a bit of technology called a Personal People Meters (PPM) that receive encoded signals from radio stations that log that information for you.  PPM’s debuted in 2007 and by 2010 were being used in 48 radio markets.

A new change for 2025 is that this year PPM’s will be lowering the threshold from 5 minutes to 3 minutes.  Traditionally if a person listens for at least 5 minutes of a quarter hour to a particular radio station, that station could get credit for the entire 15 minutes.  This year it only takes 3 minutes of continuous listening to count.

Some of the basic information that is gathered by these surveys include the age and gender of the respondents along with their address.  Additional information that we get from Nielsen includes income, spending habits, household size, and a whole host of data that includes research from affiliated research companies like Scarborough that can give us a pretty cool picture of the people, their habits and lifestyles on a local level, along with their radio listening habits.

There is also a danger in placing too much credence into the results of any one survey,  but I take a look at trends to see trends.

Also as is true with all polls, these surveys use a “sample size of the entire population to represent the entire population.  Instead of getting all 500,000 people in a city to participate, they have a representative sample of a couple thousand people and then expand or multiply to fit the criteria of the population.

Here’s the local data I use from our radio rating surveys:

  1. Cume:  That’s short for cumulative. this is the total number of listeners with each person counted once.
  2. AQH: Average Quarter Hour Persons.  This is the average number of listeners listening per 15 minutes. Except you only have to listen for 5 minutes within a quarter hour, which is what’s switching to 3 minutes.
  3. Rating Points: Average Quarter Hour Rating. The average Quarter Hour Persons estimate expressed as a percentage of the population being measured.
    Formula: AQH Persons divided by the Population x 100 = AQH Rating (%)

That last number is what is publicly released online and anyone with an internet connection can get it free. The problem that I have with using it by itself is it’s the end result of a math formula and the numbers used to get that end result are more important than that final number.

Let me demystify what I just said.

If I said I spent $100 on lunch today and Jimmy spent $200 on lunch today, what can you conclude except that Jimmy spent twice as much?

Maybe I fed 10 people at the cost of $10 each at a fast food place?  Or I bought $100 worth of groceries and prepared it and served it to 35 people?  And Jimmy, perhaps he took a client out for lunch at a decent restaurant and lunch for two including tip was a hundred bucks.

See how it’s hard to measure the value of the money spend unless you have a deeper understanding?  Similar story with the ratings that radio and TV outlets get, a ratings point is not the best way to determine the value unless you know the background information and details of the formula.

There’s one more bit of information I pull from the radio rating surveys that is very useful and that is called TSL which stands for Time Spent Listening.  It is an average length of time that a person is listening to a radio station.

I’ll have more on this in the next few weeks including a deep dive into the last rating release for Ft. Wayne radio stations and another article on how to do common sense radio advertising schedule buying that I learned when I worked in Detroit when I worked for a radio station that didn’t subscribe to the ratings.

However there is one more critical element to always remember no matter what kind of advertising you are considering and that is this:

All of these numbers are measurements of peoples media habits, but not measurements of their actual buying.  Even more critical is to remember that it is impossible to know for sure what ad exposure was the one that created the person to buy.  More on that later this year too.

Cleaning Out The Junk

Cleaning Out The Junk

by | Feb 17, 2025 | Really? The Personal ScLoHo, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

When was the last time you cleaned up your business?

Got rid of the junk you don’t need anymore?

Back in January I saw a lot of memes and social media posts from people resolving to clean up their lives in various ways.

Like getting rid of all those miscellaneous power cords and adapters that have outlived whatever they were originally used for.

Or  doing a purge of email?  My wife had a couple thousand unread emails and decided to go all in and wipe them all out with my help.

She didn’t just want to get rid of the unopened emails, she wanted her entire email account emptied.  Even the trash folder where old emails hang out for 30 days.

So I did it.  She started 2025 with an empty Gmail account.  So far there’s only been one email that she misses.  Sort of.

For me this year, I cleaned up this website a bit.  Simplified the design, removed some of the extra form-fills and scaled it down.

I’ve also been slowly but surely cleaning up my home office of the stuff I brought home in 2023 from my “office” office.

As the weather gets warmer, we’ll be doing more in the garage and outdoor areas to declutter and remove stuff.

Business wise, what junk do you need to get rid of?

My primary radio station WOWO is celebrating its 100th birthday this year and you might think that we probably have 100 years of memorabilia, but we don’t.

10 years ago, on WOWO’s 90th birthday, our program director did an excellent job of creating a History of WOWO podcast series that also includes video clips, photos, old audio and a lot of stories from the people who were part of WOWO’s history… and that’s good because many of the people who were a part of the first 50 years of WOWO are no longer around to tell those stories anymore.

As you move forward with your business this year, or your life in general, take time to get rid of the junk, saving what you really need, and updating what should be updated. Not only will it make your life and business less stressful as you declutter, its a gift to those that follow you to not have to do it when you’re gone.

You have permission to Clean Out The Junk, and keep the very best.

 

The Real Value of Talk Radio in 2025

The Real Value of Talk Radio in 2025

by | Feb 10, 2025 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, ScLoHo's Media, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

Since 2013, I’ve worked for WOWO radio in Fort Wayne Indiana.  This is WOWO’s 100th birthday this year and for the past 3 decades WOWO has been a news/talk radio station. It’s a legendary station with most of 100 years being broadcast on 1190AM.  WOWO can also be heard at 92.3 FM

WOWO can also be heard on your favorite streaming device, like Alexa or Google smart speakers, your favorite streaming audio app, or even directly from the WOWO.com website.  I’ll be sharing some information from the most recent rating period for Fort Wayne in the future, however today I’ve got insider data from a company I’ve shared with you before, Edison Research.

In their first newsletter for 2025 the headline reads:

Majority of News and Sports Audio is Consumed via AM/FM Radio.

Here’s what else they say:

Today’s insight is never-before-released data on AM/FM radio consumption and a surprising finding about how different kinds of audio content are consumed from radio.

When a respondent to Edison Research’s Share of Ear® survey records the audio they consume, they also tell us what kind of content they are listening to, including news, sports (talk or play-by-play), talk/personalities, or music.

For decades, pretty much the only way to consume news, sports, and talk audio was through the radio. But now, there is an explosion of new audio delivery options available to listeners.

News audio is by far radio’s strongest suit. Just under 70% of all daily time spent listening to news audio is happening on AM/FM radio. Close behind is sports, at 61%. The majority of news and sports audio in the U.S. is consumed via AM/FM radio.

Meanwhile, AM/FM radio takes a strong, but considerably lower portion of the other two content categories: talk/personalities and music. As we have reported previously, podcasting has taken the lead in the talk category, and of course, music fans now have many options for consumption.

For businesses looking to invite local consumers to be their customers, the talk radio formats are huge. This year I officially represent  both News Talk WOWO radio and also our Sports Talk radio station, 1380 The Fan.

Before I wrap this up, I’ll address the other audio choices we have.

Podcasts.  They have been growing in popularity for awhile and along with their popularity, there’s also been tremendous growth in the number of different podcasts we can listen to. I just did a Google search and answers say there are between 3 million and 6 million different podcasts covering nearly any topic you can imagine. While that’s pretty cool as a consumer, it’s overwhelming as a local business attempting to figure out where to advertise in the podcast world.  Here’s what we’ve done at Federated Media, the parent company I work for… Our own show hosts have their own podcasts.  On WOWO radio both our afternoon host, Casey Hendrickson and Fort Wayne Morning Show Host Kayla Blakeslee take their shows and especially the interviews and news stories and save them as podcasts so listeners can listen on demand, just like all the other podcasts are on demand.  Except Casey and Kayla’s podcasts are an extension of their daily radio shows.

Streaming services.  Our radio stations are listened to via all the streaming services too.  When I’m working from my home office, that’s how I listen.

Want to invite our local listeners to  become customers to your local business? Contact me. Scott@ScLoHo.net

One last item about Kayla and Casey.  On January 6, 2025, Barrett Media released the results of a national survey of radio professionals and Kayla was named one of the top 25 out of 70 morning radio personalities.  The story is here for Kayla.

Casey was named one of the top 25 afternoon radio personalities in the United States.  Details for Casey are here.

What Should You Include In Your Radio Ad?

What Should You Include In Your Radio Ad?

by | Feb 3, 2025 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

There’s a lot of information on how to buy advertising, where to place it and how often it should run, but one subject that I rarely see talked about in my industry is the content of the ad.  And if there’s not much being said inside my industry, the advice from outside is even worse if you can find it.

Today I’m going to show you how to apply Human Relationship Principles to your ad content.

Last month I was meeting with a successful business owner who is returning to our radio station airwaves and I’ll share with you the advice I gave him.

Everything that we include in an ad has to be measured from a listener perspective, not the business owner perspective.

Read that last line again.

People consume media as individuals.  Unlike attending a concert or sporting event where there are hundreds or thousands in attendance, the audience listening to your ad is one person.  Even if 5000 listeners are tuned in at the time your ad airs on the radio, it’s a different experience than the crowd experience.

For now though I want to focus on the content of your ad.

For a long time 60 seconds were the standard length for radio ads.  We had a full minute to talk about your business.  However as our attention spans have become shorter, I questioned if we need 60 seconds or would 30 seconds be better?

When I was the WOWO General Sales Manager, I restructured our rate card.  The net effect was we could offer shorter ads for less money than we were previously, and this allowed some of our advertising partners to get more ads for the same money, and it lowered the cost of entry to get an effective radio campaign on WOWO.

As an advertising copy writer, I noticed that most, not all but most 60 second ads had about 30 to 40 seconds of good stuff, and the remaining seconds were repeated info or unnecessary ad-fluff filler.  So I worked with my sales team to help them improve the ad content to trim the message to 30 seconds in many cases.

Next step is, can you communicate your message in 10 or 15 seconds instead of 30?

This takes a bit more discipline but it’s a great exercise.

After all, if someone takes twice as long to tell you something because they included lots of extra unnecessary information, that can be annoying, right?

I’ve trained others on in-person networking and elevator speeches.  An elevator speech  concept is you’ve stepped into an elevator and have a few seconds to tell someone who you are as you ride to the next floor.  What do you say?  This same exercise that helps you choose your words wisely should be applied to your ads.  Because, after all, your ad message is being delivered to an individual.

So last month when I was meeting with this business owner, we were reviewing the ads I had created for his restoration company.  We had already agreed on a budget and the length of the ads, I had 30 second and 15 second options for him.

He selected 15 seconds and that gets him a decent amount of exposure for the money invested in the campaign.

The initial ad was timely and straight to the point.  Focus on Frozen pipes and water damage along with the company name and web address.  Even mentioned the phone number. which is very old-school.  Initially, he asked if we could mention that it’s January and cold weather and if your pipes freeze, contact them, etc… My response was we don’t need to tell them about the month or the weather, we had 15 seconds to talk to the people who already had the problem and connect them with your company.

Now a tiny fraction of listeners will ever have frozen pipes this winter, but we need to reach as many potential people as possible and with the shorter 15 second messages instead of longer ads, i can get their ad on more frequently which builds familiarity with our listeners.  Since this company was established and not a start-up and a previous advertising partner, the ads didn’t need to sell the company, just the solution they are providing to our listeners who need their help.

It’s really that simple.

By the way I did rework the Frozen Pipe ad slightly to make sure the words we used we correct and we only promised what they could deliver.  Here in Fort Wayne, Indiana we’ve had a streak of sub-freezing temperatures that will make this particular ad timely for awhile.  The other ad I created for them is also ready to air once the cold spell lifts.

There you have it, a real life example of what to put in your radio ad and just as important what to leave out of your ad. In a future article we’ll have more tips on this.  In the meantime, contact me for help with your ad campaign.