Moneyball: Tis’ The Season To Plan Budgets

Nuvoodoo Reasearch: Leigh Jacobs & Carolyn Gilbert

For the coming year in the radio business, you’ll again be asked to do more with less. If you’re a programmer or manager, you may be responsible for more stations in your market – or more stations outside your market.

Research and marketing are always on the block as potential cuts. Yet we know that the number one cause of tuneout for music radio is bad songs. We know that external marketing is the only way to tell those who don’t cume a station why they might really enjoy listening to that station. At NuVoodoo we innovate new ways to stretch budgets, giving our clients the biggest bang for the smallest budget in both research and marketing.

RESEARCH

COORDINATED LIBRARY TESTS. We have extensive experience conducting coordinated library tests for companies across multiple stations within a given format. The stations provide a single hooklist of as many as 600 titles, using a common backbone of question groups for each market. Running them all at once saves on fielding and processing. Running them with slightly smaller samples in each market saves on sample costs. The stations get a significant sample of their important listeners. Combining data from one station with the others gets them (1) the flexibility to run deeper breakouts and (2) the added confidence of being able to compare their market with others. This approach allows us to complete an OMT for a bit over half our usual cost per market.

COORDINATED “CALLOUT.” The approach described above works for testing new music on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. Coordinated hooklist. Trimmed sample. Costs contained. Custom market information available for local programming teams. Friendly pricing.

OMT LITE. These lower-price library tests strip everything to the bone – except for the sample. 100 perfectly screened respondents. 400 hooks – enough to check at least the active library in nearly all formats. The shorter music inventory fielded with no question groups means we can turn these studies quickly. All-in price under $10K.

ASAP STUDIES. Tactical perceptual studies with a shorter interview and a 300-person sample. The sample fields quickly. The shorter interview forces a strong focus on the most important issues, guaranteeing that we achieve an actionable result. Under $10K.

MARKETING

Many station operators have a digital advertising buyer on staff for station clients who can build station promotional campaigns alongside the client work they’re doing. So, why would you pay our markup?

Our markup:

• Starts with better targeting because of our years working in the space, meaning fewer wasted ad impressions (and less wasted ad budget).
• Gets you access to our on-going proprietary research into the best ad channels and best social media to reach partisans in different formats and how to reach even the tiny subset of those partisans likely to participate in the ratings.
• Gets you access to the results of our anonymized profiling of tens of thousands of our own research respondents, extrapolated to the wider universe through an industry best-practice called lookalike modeling.
• Means we can employ our Nielsen Marketing Cloud overlay on your behalf.
• Gets you our team’s deep experience in targeting and our best practices on messaging, artwork, and video. Plus, we make adjustments to optimize your campaign during the run of your program and manage the timetable throughout.

Beyond buying social media channels and the usual online inventory, we’re working with new technology in:

• CONNECTED TV/OTT-TV. Delivering the highest watch-through rates available, our proprietary ad technology ensures as many impressions as possible reach the most relevant targets to drive tune-in and increased occasions.
• CONTEXTUAL VIDEO. Our technology scans audio, text, video and graphic content to validate appropriate context for your campaign. We serve your ad in front of 100% relevant video content and viewers. Better response rates because listeners see your advertising at the right place and the right time.
• DIGITAL OUTDOOR. Retargeting mobile devices of those who’ve been exposed to station outdoor campaigns on digital billboards, bus shelters, urban furniture, etc. They saw the billboard and now they’re reminded via other digital channels as they move through their lives.
• Targeting any location-enabled mobile device based on where it’s been anytime in the past three months. Targeting concerts, events, festivals. You could target a competitor’s event or any other event where your potential fans may have gathered.

Even with our markup, we can deliver competitive CPMs and we’ve conducted digital campaigns in 2025 starting at under $5K.

BRAND LIFT

NuVoodoo clients are finding success in increased renewals, extensions, and additional sales by supplying their clients with brand lift studies.

The concept of brand lift studies is simple: screen two samples across the same demo, ethnic composition, and geography. One sample is screened to be listeners of the stations included in the schedule – those exposed to your client’s campaign. The other sample is an unexposed “control” group. Radio companies using brand lift studies accept the small sales expense as an investment in their continued success.

We showcased a recent brand lift study for an expanding local bank in a webinar. Competing with much larger institutions, our client, the cluster of radio stations, knew they were starting at near zero awareness with the bank’s campaign. You’ll get all the details of their success in less than 15 minutes in the webinar video on our website.

NuVoodoo can scale brand lift studies to make them work for radio ad budgets. Studies can be run across a group or market cluster. We can cover several clients in a study when schedules align. We work to make costs commensurate with budgets. Reach out to me at leigh@nuvoodoo.com for more information.