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Clear Channel, Radio One PPM Encoding Holdouts In Philly
December 27, 2006 at 11:26 AM (PT)
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According to an article in MEDIAWEEK, it looks like both CLEAR CHANNEL and RADIO ONE are at loggerheads with ARBITRON in their contracts, and have yet to agree to encode their signals for the start of PPM ratings measurement on JANUARY 11th, 2007, in PHILADELPHIA.
A total of nine stations are affected, CLEAR CHANNEL's six include Top 40 WIOQ (Q102), Tropical WUBA, Urban AC WDAS, Gospel WDAS-A, Rhythmic AC WISX (MY106.1), and Urban WUSL (POWER 98.9). RADIO ONE's stations include Top 40/Rhythmic WPHI, Gospel WPPZ, and Urban AC WRNB. All together, that's more than 25% of the market.
That leaves a lot of questions, in terms of how ARBITRON will address the issues in terms of data rollout, and whether this decision by CLEAR CHANNEL and RADIO ONE will affect how advertising agency buys for their clusters.
While ARBITRON VP/Communications THOM MOCARSKY declined comment specifically about CLEAR CHANNEL and RADIO ONE, he assured ALL ACCESS, "We will have more to say on this matter as we get closer to the launch date of the PHILLY 'demonstration' period on JANUARY 11."
One key thing that MOCARSKY did bring up: "Stations do not have to be a subscriber in order to encode and encoders are free. We will only measure stations that are encoded."
So far, no comments from CLEAR CHANNEL, or RADIO ONE.

