The real score on sports radio

'This is the thing we always laugh about. Take the AFC championship last year. You look at the Bruskin number, and it will tell you that more people listened to the game on the radio than watched it on TV. Intuitively, you know it’s absolutely ridiculous.'

The real score
on sports radio

It's anyone's guess. Buyers: Bruskin #s sky high.

By Gabriel Spitzer

     On Aug. 5, 1921, as the Philadelphia Phillies and the Pittsburgh Pirates took the field, the airwaves crackled to life and the first Major League Baseball broadcast was heard on the radio.
   Sportscasts were one of radio’s first uses.
   Yet in the 80 years since, it seems that no one has yet figured out how to measure accurately the audience of radio sportscasts.
   For years the industry standard has been the telephone surveys of Bruskin, the research firm now under the umbrella of RoperASW.
    But many media buyers say that RoperASW/Bruskin’s numbers are vastly overstated and that they must routinely slash them by half or more in order to get a realistic estimate of the sportscast’s audience.
    “In a way, it’s like the dirty little secret of network sports,” says John Moore, vice president and group media director at Mullen.
   Moore says he and his colleagues always compare the RoperASW/Bruskin estimates to other figures—television ratings, for instance—often with decidedly odd results.
   “This is the thing we always laugh about. Take the AFC championship last year. You look at the Bruskin number, and it will tell you that more people listened to the game on the radio than watched it on TV. Intuitively, you know it’s absolutely ridiculous,” he says.
    Neither Arbitron nor RADAR regularly measures individual radio sportscasts, and so stations and networks tend to rely on either proprietary research or on RoperASW/Bruskin.
    RoperASW/Bruskin’s surveys are conducted over the telephone and are considered “recall” surveys, meaning the subject is asked whether he or she listened to a particular game or during a particular time period.
    The methodology is widely considered sound by researchers, but the results are often way off from diary-based or other research methods.
    “We don’t think that sports radio is measured very well. It is our sense that the numbers are very high,” says Natalie Swed Stone, director of national radio services at OMD.
    “When you look at the station’s overall audience on a given day, the numbers we see for sports are often 10 times higher. It doesn’t seem possible, so we discount them. We reduce the estimates to something we’re comfortable with. We start by cutting them in half, and go from there.”
    Officials at RoperASW/Bruskin did not return multiple phone calls seeking comment. However, the radio networks that use RoperASW/Bruskin’s research in their sales defend the methodology, while admitting its imperfections.
    “It’s aided recall, so that could inflate the numbers somewhat, as opposed to unaided recall. But this service has been around for almost 20 years. From a researcher’s perspective, it’s a solid research company,” says Tom Evans, senior vice president of research at ABC Radio Networks.
    “What’s important in any survey is the type of questions you ask. At ABC we’re very specific. We might say, ‘Last Sunday the Reds played the Yankees and it was broadcast on a radio station in your area. Did you listen to the game on radio?’ If they say yes, we say, ‘How many innings did you listen to on radio?’ Radio is mentioned three times, so they don’t confuse it with TV.”
    Still, some media buyers are not confident that all the survey questions are so precise.
    “They ask the questions in a much more nebulous fashion. They might ask, ‘Did you listen to football in the last week?’” says Steve Kalb, vice president and director of broadcast media at Mullen.
    Kalb says he believes that imprecise questions asked after the fact contribute to inflated results.
    “The Bruskin numbers for a football game are represented as higher numbers than the ESPN telecast from last year. And I just don’t buy that at all,” he says.
    Many media buyers who deal in sports radio are encouraged by technological developments like Arbitron’s portable people meters, which could cut through the limitations of both diary- and survey-based research.
    But, as OMD’s Swed Stone puts it: “That’s down the road, and we still have to do our jobs in the short term.”
     At least one buyer says he thinks pointing fingers at RoperASW/Bruskin, without proposing a viable alternative, is fundamentally wrongheaded.
     “Is it good research? Probably not. Is there anything better out there? Probably not much. To me it gives directional guidance, and that’s all,” says Howard Nass, formerly of Initiative Media and currently in the process of launching HN Media Services, a new agency in New York.
      “We’re never going to have adequate research. That’s what you get paid for, to sift through the research. You get paid to estimate ratings, based on your knowledge base. What you should do is sit down with Bruskin and say, ‘Don’t go after numbers, go after other things, like the impact of commercials in sports as opposed to music or talk. That’s what’s meaningful.’”

-Gabriel Spitzer is a staff writer for Media Life.

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