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MUMBAI:
Not in the car; and not in the local trains. Over 90 per cent
of FM radio listeners are currently still at home.
Most
of the listeners are not high brow SEC A & B, but
the great Indian lower middle classes |
That's the finding ORG Marg has come up with, during its recently
concluded radio audience measurement study, the first of its
kind in the country. The study, done in Mumbai among 930 randomly
selected 15 year old and above individuals, also established
the fact that it is the SEC D and E listeners who are tuning
in the most. Hip RJs with the cultivated accents may soon
have to be on their way out.
Not surprisingly, the channel that registered top of mind
awareness was Vividh Bharati, the public broadcast channel
that generations of Indians have grown up on. The fledgling
private FM channels are but a blip on the screen for many
listeners, although Radio Mirchi does manage to come in a
poor third after Vividh Bharati and All India Radio's FM1.
AIR's FM2 follows closely behind while Radio City, Win 94.6
and Go 92.6 don't have much of audience attention. The newly
launched Red FM, from the India Today stable, does not even
figure in the stakes.
Gender wise too, there is only a slight skew towards the male
in the listenership, according to the study. 58 per cent of
radio listeners in the city are male. A meager 12 per cent
of these belong to the advertiser's darling SEC A, while just
14 per cent to SEC B. A huge chunk of the listenership (45
per cent) comes from the SECs D and E, while 29 per cent belongs
to SEC C.
Analysis of radio channels by time slots shows that the morning
peaks (7 am to 11.30 am) are higher than the evening peaks
(7 pm to 11 pm). While most advertisers as well as private
radio channels have been assuming that the average listener
is the 18 to 34 year old executive driving to and from work
in the metropolis, the truth may lie somewhere in between.
ORG Marg executives believe that with the proliferation of
miniature FM receivers, the listenership patterns in Mumbai
could change drastically in the coming months, the results
of the just concluded survey will enable radio players to
know what to charge advertisers, and also tailor the content,
says the research agency. Radio currently commands barely
1.5 per cent of the total ad pie in the country. While the
radio scenario is still in a nebulous stage in India, a technical
committee of all major broadcasters, ad agencies, ad houses,
advertisers and media-buying houses headed by media research
guru Praveen Tripathi has been convened to decide the best
research method for Indian conditions.
While there is no radio audience measurement system available
in the country so far, the study was conducted via interviews
using a structured questionnaire. While the diary method (requiring
selected respondents to record their listenership in a pre-coded
diary) was believed to be too tedious for the Indian scenario,
ORG Marg relied on the recall method, where respondents were
asked about yesterday listenership (listenership on the day
previous to the interview). The agency also toyed with the
idea of using wrist meters ( a method popular in Switzerland),
which use microchips fitted in the meters to encode sounds
and record listeners' preferences.
To read the ORG-Marg Presentation on Radio Listening
Habits in Mumbai click
here
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