In theory, the advent of the Arbitron Portable People Meter means stations will no longer be chained to programming in quarter-hour increments.
But what does that really mean? Coleman Insights says it plans to answer that with a series of studies this year. Coleman says “Mapping the DNA of PPM” will be a look at how PPM reports responses of radio audiences to different programming elements.
“Some in the industry have already made proclamations of what works and doesn’t work in a PPM world without rigorous analysis of the data,” said President Jon Coleman. He said the series will be based on reviews of the “huge quantity” of data generated by PPM, and he noted the “high level of uncertainty” when PPM comes to a market right now.
The first report is to be released this month.
