Radio Is A Moneyball Pick

In 2002 and 2003, the underdog Oakland Athletics made it to the playoffs by relying on statistics rather than money and perceived value to build their baseball team. They called this Moneyball - they put their money into only those players the comprehensive statistics showed would prevail. Their technique and its success changed the way Major League Baseball now builds and manages teams.

Shift the setting to the world of advertising media. Statistics show that the smartest Moneyball move for building a successful campaign is to include radio in the media mix. The stats have been assembled by Nielsen and are available to everyone.

Nielsen Catalina recently released a study of 500 ad campaigns and the contribution to sales made by each of the key elements. The Moneyball analysis is that Creative is the key element at 47%, followed in importance by Reach, at 22%. The conclusion: A campaign that doesn't reach many people won't drive many sales. The streets of diminishing sales are paved with hyper-targeted ad campaigns.

What drives Reach best is ... radio. Nielsen's Q1 2017 Total Audience Report assembles myriad statistics, and virtually every table in the report shows that the best likelihood of generating reach comes from using radio. The leading medium for reaching adults 18+ and teens daily, weekly or in a month is ... radio.

Not only is radio's reach enormous, it is powerful and consistent. Across years. Across generations. Nielsen does analytics that are the Moneyballer's dream. In Q1 2017, radio was used by 98% or more of people 25+, 94% of A18-24 and 95% of teens in a month.

That Reach is meaningful, not just glancing. Look at the daily time spent with radio among media in Q1 for the past three years. It points to the importance of radio in the lives of people from all generations and frames radio's consistency. Time spent with radio among all A18+ goes from 1:51 to 1:52 to 1:51. Among radio listeners, it goes from 2:42 in 2015 to 2:44 in 2016 and 2017. There is no real difference in how often radio is used across generations. Radio represents 16% of the total time spent daily with media for millennials, 17% for gen X and 16% for baby boomers. Most of that time is concentrated on a person's favorite radio station, so it is easy not just to build Reach, but to build an effective amount of message reception. (Chart data source: Nielsen Total Audience Report Q1 2017.)

The Moneyball people would say these stats are indicative of success and probably advise ad agencies and advertisers to revisit which media deliver what stats when building their campaign media mixes. At a September 2017 conference, Pankaj Kumar, VP of Media Sciences for Comcast/NBC/Universal, reported the Big Data numbers crunching his team does consistently shows that "radio is doing phenomenally well for us." Comcast's VP/Marketing & Communications, Larry Schweber, noted that their stats show that radio drives retail - eight of 10 people through the door cite radio ads as the reason they came. At this same conference, John Fix, Analyst/Manager N.A. Media & Marketing at P&G and Nielsen Marketing Effectiveness EVP Lana Busignani, discussed how the CPG and Retail industry are leveraging Moneyball-type stats that warrant the inclusion of radio in their media marketing mix.

The Moneyball system definitely would have radio on their list of desired players. They would conclude that using radio puts brands in a position to compete successfully against bigger, richer challengers. They would be right.