Radio Drops #27: The Idea of Quarter Hour Maintenance

It came with the debut of the Arbitron ratings company in 1968. The company's methodology was to recruit people who would agree to write down their daily listening for a week. They got a little 'diary' or journal for the purpose. With all the collected data, Arbitron provided something new, a very valuable sales tool. Radio ad salespeople could tell the advertiser how many people might hear his commercial in any given quarter hour's listening.

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Five Minutes Into the Next Quarter Hour

Here’s a short story about how the Arbitron ratings company shaped radio programming and formatting: the tactics and strategies of this thing we do.

Door to Door, by Phone, Then by Diary

In the ’40s and ’50s there were two ratings companies, Pulse and Hooper, for C.E. Hooper. Pulse sent interviewers door to door. Can you imagine, door to door, asking about radio listening?

Hooper did telephone contact and had a huge in-tab, meaning they contacted a whole lot of people for each report. Subscribing stations would take those listenership numbers and show advertisers how many people their commercials would reach.

Arbitron used diaries. Everybody in a household over 12 got a little diary to write down every radio station they listened to for seven days, along with the time they started and stopped listening, each time they had the radio on.

I can argue about the reliability of that methodology to no end, but that’s what radio stations used my entire programming career. Arbitron numbers. They still do them today. It’s called Nielsen now.

The computer age was just getting rolling, and Arbitron fed the diary information into computers and got a massive amount of data they could slice and dice every which way. It gave us ratings sorted by age, by demographic and by time of day.

The Average Quarter Hour

Most importantly, Arbitron gave us an average quarter hour listenership estimate. You could tell the advertiser: not only do 100,000 people listen to our station at least once a week, but in the average quarter hour we have 1,300 listeners, and in morning drive 3,100 listeners who are going to hear your advertisement. That was a very, very powerful sales tool.

Part of the Arbitron methodology was that a station had to get at least five minutes of listening within a quarter hour for it to count as a full quarter hour. So if a diary showed a listener tuned in at 1:05 and listened until 1:19, that counted for only one quarter hour. But if that listener tuned in at 1:10 and listened until 1:20, those 10 minutes counted as two.

Quarter hour maintenance. That was the goal. If someone is listening now, do whatever you can to keep them listening until at least five minutes into the next quarter hour. Every good, smart program director since the middle or latter part of the ’60s has pondered that. In sports terms: how do you keep the ball moving? How do you keep the drive going?

Building the Sweeps on the Clock

Imagine a clock. A real clock, not the digital thing. This is your format clock. This is your store, if you will, what you’re going to give people. It’s mostly music. It’s also commercials, and broadcast stations were required to do news every hour, generally at the top of the hour. And there is disc jockey talk.

When you start arranging all that on your format clock, the first thing you want for quarter hour maintenance is a song starting no later than 10 past the hour, with the music continuing until at least 20 past. That little tactic came to be known as a music sweep.

Once you’d swept through the quarter hour, at 20 past you stopped for your commercials. That’s where the term spot break came from. After the break you wanted to be back into music by 25 past at the latest, and you did not want to stop the music until at least 35 past.

The next spot break is at 35. You want to be out of it and back into music no later than 40 past, and the music should continue until 50 past, when you hit the next spot break.

Did It Work?

Successful radio programming is measured in two ways. First, does it have a good number of loyal listeners, people who tune in every day? And second, how long do those listeners listen?

In the end, I don’t know if those music sweeps were actually accomplishing all that. I hoped so, and so did all of my cohort doing the same thing. There were plenty of top radio stations that didn’t think about this at all, and their quarter hours were just great.

But for those of us who wanted listeners to like our stations way more than their second or third choice, the idea of quarter hour maintenance, of the quarter hour sweep, got us young program directors thinking. Thinking of other things we might do to put our format and our station together, to keep listeners listening just a little bit longer.

And that is still the truth today. Program directors and music directors have got to keep thinking: what can I do to keep people listening to this station just a little bit longer?