When market research misses the mark

A colleague told me about a call he recently received. It was from a research company doing some radio research (ironically, he used to work in radio). Unfortunately, he couldn't give them any input -- his age placed him outside the 12-35-year-old demographic they were surveying (but not by much).

Whichever radio station is paying for the research, I'm not sure they're going to get any useful information from it. Why? The group they're trying to reach is self-filtering in two significant ways.

1) Telephone surveys only poll those with land lines. Currently, 30% of 18-24 year-olds and 40% of 25-29 year-olds live in households with only cell phones. Which means a significant part of the demographic will never be reached by the researchers.

2) According to Arbitron, 22% of 12-17 year-olds and 17% of 18-24 year-olds have decreased their radio listening over the past year. Portable players, especially the iPod and iPhone, are primary content providers for this age group.

So this research group will be sampling from the fraction of the demographic that's been left behind by two major trends. What will happen to the station that tries to target this group based on that information?

They should have talked to my friend.

- Ralph

Day 53 of the WJMA Podwatch

Another milestone -- and our top five posts

This weekend "CE Conversations" passed another major milestone. According to Feedburner, (which tracks the subscribers to our RSS feed and hits to our Feedburner mirror site), we've had over 30,000 views to our modest little blog. (The StatCounter down in the lower right of this page tracks direct traffic to this site, but it hasn't been activated very long).

Every 10,000 views, we take a look at the most -- and least -- popular posts of all time, to see what you like to read (and what you don't).

So here's our five most popular posts since we launched in August 2006.

5) A Worthy Supporting Role (Ken) -- commentary on Rex Ingram's role in "Sahara" and how it played against racial stereotypes.

4) Who needs an iPhone, when.... (Ken) -- suggesting an alternative to the iPhone madness. It was written about the first generation iPhone, but Ken's thoughts are still just as valid.

3) Kens' Jeopardy Adventure (Ken) -- a new entry to the top five. I wonder how many readers thought this was about Ken Jennings. If our Ken aquits himself well on the show, maybe it won't matter.

2) The RIAA and the low-price spread (Ralph) -- another new entry to the list. The story of how the dairy industry tried to turn consumers away from margarine and back to butter with archane legislation seemd to me to have interesting parallels with the record industry's current shenanigans.

And the most popular post to date remains,

1) Greenberg Revisited (Ralph) -- discussing the importance of well-researched price guides as opposed to relying on Ebay to determine the value of collectibles

When we started, both Ken and I were writing about an equal number of posts. But with the passage of time and Ken's increasingly rigorous triathlon training regimen, his contributions have become less frequent even as his race stats have improved.

Quality still trumps quality among CE Conversation readers, though. Despite his decreased posting schedule, Ken still has three of the top five posts -- and his overall total of views still bests mine.

- Ralph

Day 30 of the WJMA Web Watch.