Monitoring Cell-Phone Only Households

Or " landline only households." It's a brilliant feature to counter Arbitron's current "cap" of 10% or 15% of cell phone only households in any given sample. Remember that Nielsen's pilot-testing in Lexington, KY showed 23% of households were "CPO." Some markets will run even higher than that. And the Nielsen ability to select for cell phone only (because it uses address-based sampling) is a not-so-subtle dig at Arbitron. To push one level deeper, Nielsen research shows that cell phone only households typically display higher levels of radio listening. So a client might conclude that Nielsen's sticker-diary methodology and address-based sampling is going to look better for radio. (Not to mention the sample sizes that are at least twice the size of Arbitron's, in the 51 markets outside the top 100 where Nielsen is putting its nose under the tent.) We still don't have a release date for the first Nielsen radio ratings, beyond "August." The actual field work was conducted in March and April, because Nielsen wanted to give itself plenty of time for this first release."

I think most of us live in markets, even in Twin Falls, Idaho, where Cell Phone Only numbers outpace Arbitron cap numbers in the survey which brings up big questions about the validity of that survey methodology.  At Luce Performance Group, one of the few ratings metrics we really care about is cume, it lets us know how large that 1% that is in the Buyers Awareness Cycle for any given good or service when running our ROI Equation For Success.  That equation and the impact of showing a client that you can deliver a 20% return on their advertising investment can take their attention away from lackluster ratings and focus it on the RESULTS!