Yesterday, Nova Scotia experienced its first total eclipse of the sun since Carly Simon decided to throw shade on Warren Beatty for flying up there in his Lear Jet in 1970 to check out the action.
On reflection, it’s a good thing he didn’t fly in a Boeing. There are more bits falling off the average Boeing than a skorokoro taxi in downtown Jozi.
Talking about shade and clouds in your coffee though, we know that the ‘path of totality’ for the solar eclipse will cross North America, passing over Mexico, the United States and Canada.
The path of totality is the area where people on Earth can see the moon completely cover the sun, as the moon’s shadow falls upon them. Think of it as a funnel-shaped inner shadow of the moon being projected onto the Earth’s surface. In advertising terms, full-funnel coverage.
Remarkably the path of totality is only 185km wide, which means anyone standing outside that zone only saw a very small part of the picture. A partial eclipse, in fact. Fewer than 10% of the total population of the US saw the total eclipse.
The memes
Despite that, this event is being memed as the biggest eclipse ever, not just because everything is big in Texas, but because it will be viewed by more people than ever before.
But you can’t capture the dramatic essence of a total eclipse just by measuring the number of people who observe it. You would need to listen to first-hand accounts from the people who were there. Find out what impact the event had on them.
Of course, the best way to describe this remarkable phenomenon is to stand in the path of totality yourself.
And it’s the same with a radio station.
It’s not enough to know how many people listen to a radio station. Trying to evaluate the contribution of radio by using BRC RAM_Amplify audience data, to the exclusion of all other perspectives, is like standing outside the listeners path of audio totality and concluding that nothing dramatic or unusual is happening.
As strategists, sometimes we need to leave behind the quantitative reality of media audience procurement and step into the listeners ‘audioverse’.
Crafting a response
Many doctors use a pre-diagnostic patient interview technique to establish RFE (reason for encounter) as a precursor to offering a formal diagnosis of symptoms and suggested treatment. After all, you don’t need to ponder the cause of your patient’s headache if they can tell you they’ve just been hit on the noggin by a piece of Boeing plummeting from the sky.
Once the physician understands the real reason for the encounter, they can begin to craft the appropriate medical response.
Radiocentre Audio Generation Differentology 2022 identifies x7 distinctive listening states. Each of these listening states represents a unique RFE. The raison d’écouter. Once an advertiser understands the reason why a listener engages with a station, they can begin to craft the appropriate advertising response.
You need to start your radio planning by understanding why the listener is there at all, not just by counting the number of listeners.
If you’re a radio advertiser, I’ll bet you think this blog is about you.
Don’t you!
Don’t you!
Gordon Muller is Africa’s oldest surviving media strategist. Author of Media Planning – Art or Science. Mostly harmless! Read his Khulumamedia Blog here.
