Richard Harker

As founder of one of the oldest radio research firms in the country, Richard Harker has seen radio - and its relationship with research - evolve over the course of decades. He has also seen how research has been spun to create perceptions that reflect more of a specific agenda than the reality. That's why he has become one of the more outspoken opponents of "research misuse" in Harker Research's "Radio Insights" blog. Here Richard Harker describes the evolution of radio research and expands on some of his more recent views.

What made you decide to start a research company?

I started the company in 1989; I saw an opportunity to work with selected radio stations that appreciated research and the relationship between research and ratings success. The research business, back then, was very one-on-one ... a lot of personal contact when meeting with radio stations, then gaining their trust after they saw success using our service. The business started slowly in the sense that you had to demonstrate value ... and it went from there.

How has Harker separated itself from other research companies over the years?

If you look at the arc of research from 1989 to today, there have been several phases. The first phase came when there wasn't a broad acceptance to the value of research. When I started there were a lot of PDs who I called "swashbucklers," who felt like they didn't need to know what listeners wanted because they "knew" their judgment was more important. That period faded out slowly as research began to prove itself.

The second phase was when everyone was doing research; then it became a matter of doing better research, differentiating yourself and proving your advice is better than anyone else's. That was when we grew most rapidly, as a lot of competitors were recently unemployed PDs who decided to become their own research company.

Then came consolidation, when management was more aware of the bottom line pressure to deliver product. That was a period where you had to offer a broad rage of services and do them efficiently. Unlike the early days, where you could work with a single radio station autonomously, when consolidation entered the picture, you had to work with groups and clusters, doing research on a broader scale.

At that point, we started our own field service, with over 100 employees on the telephone, doing the research that worked with large groups. During consolidation, that was very important.

The most recent phase came with the recession, when it became a matter of cutting back. It somewhat brought us back to the early days, when it was more of a matter of providing value. We've had to evolve along with radio

Has getting an accurate representation of cell phone-only households been as great a challenge to you as it has been to Arbitron?

Yes, it's brought on a situation where we have had to use several different means to recruit people. We use online, the phone, face-to-face ... several different ways to recruit, which makes it more likely to get everyone, be it a CPO or a traditional landline. The whole industry of market research has to stay on top of this.

In your blog on the Harker Research website, you seem to take great issue with those who cherry-pick research data to suit their particular narrative. What do you do to counter that?

To best serve our clients, it's a matter of making sure we have the best possible objective info, because the ultimate goal of our clients remains to grow market share, stay on top of trends and understand the marketplace. It used to be a matter of just looking at terrestrial radio competitors; now there's a whole host of competitors who aren't fellow broadcasters. People have a lot more audio choices today, so for our clients it's a matter how to maintain relevance.

I do think there's a different body of research that people release for an emotional purpose. That's not the research we do for our clients, which is confidential. We strive to have a whole body of research that's below the radar, while at the same time we try to expose research that has a foreign agenda. If research is released, promoted and used as a promotional tool, we point that out and identify stuff that might be spun to create or disturb a particular agenda. That's what we're most critical of in a broad sense; we're not against any research that's negative, but when the research is subject to interpretation, we want to dissolve the conflict between perception and the actual findings.

On a macro level, what can you do to combat the somewhat popular perceptions that radio is a slow to no-growth industry, while online is where the real action is now and especially in the future?

It's very difficult. That's radio's challenge right now. For instance, if you ask the average person what proportion of Americans listen to radio on weekly basis, very few people would even guess as high as 70% ... when the reality is upwards of 90%. Those numbers are verifiable facts with multiple sources, yet the average person can't imagine that. What we write about a lot is the continued relevance of radio vs. the image of radio as somehow being irrelevant because "all these people" are abandoning it.

We first faced this kind of thing with satellite radio. People assumed that everyone would listen to satellite and abandon terrestrial, which of course is not true. Yet once something like that gets established in a person's mind, it can be very difficult to change. It'll take a lot of work to show and convince people of the real truth; at times it can be virtually impossible to change their mindset.

That's why we use the blog to point out the misperceptions and misleading statements coming out about new media and how radio is dead. All we can do is point out the facts and what isn't true, but it's going to take time for that to sink in

Given the current recession as well as the perceptual problems you just brought up, what can a PD do to grow the station's business?

The one thing we have learned is that media consumption is not a zero sum game. It can be an additive sort of thing, in that when a new medium or audio source comes into being, it often times doesn't replace an older audio source, but it adds to it. It all boils down to offering unique, compelling product -- radio understands that on some level, but got lazy for a while. When it was just competing against other stations in the market, it didn't have to work as hard as you do today, when you're competing with media that could includes hundreds, if not thousands of stations on Net radio and a myriad of audio sources. It raises the bar; we have to be that more on target every single minute than ever before. Layer that on top of PPM and its characteristics of capturing drive-by listening ... and radio has to do a much better job of reaching and entertaining people than it ever has.

Speaking of the PPM, how does the fact that only a certain number of markets, the top 50 or 75, will have access to the PPM, while everyone else will still use the diary. How will that impact the way you conduct research?

First off, you're right, it does create a certain dichotomy where if you're in a diary market, all things we learned on how to game the diary remain true, but if you're in a larger market, you have to make this transition to learning a whole different game. Not only do you get different numbers with the different methodology, but the whole approach to gain audience changes. It creates a schizophrenic industry where we come up with two sets of recommendations and two different strategies depending on market size.

...And ultimately, two different kinds of radio programming. How can such a dichotomy be good for the business?

It isn't; the transition to PPM hurt radio because Arbitron wasn't fixing the diary. Its whole growth goes back to days when radio was measured by telephone. Arbitron attacked the phone methodology. They came out with a lot of research that said the diary was superior. So they spent the new couple of decades selling the virtues of the diary.

Then the advertising community suddenly said that the diary was flawed, so Arbitron came up with a whole new system that's supposedly much better, which is all well and good for Arbitron, but what does it say to those markets still measured by the diary? They're not worth better ratings simply because they're not big enough? It raises questions that shouldn't be asked.

The real markets that are going to have to wrestle with this are markets on the end of the PPM line. If, say, market #50 will be the last one done by PPM and #51 is measured by the diary, the question becomes is the PPM worth the 50-60% higher cost for stations in markets #49 or #50 just because they happen to be in slightly larger markets than #51 and lower? It's a tough decision.

Finally, bottom line; are you still bullish on radio's future?

If you define radio in all the ways that it can be delivered, it will always have power. But while there are a lot of different ways to deliver your product, you still have to avoid falling into the trap of overlooking the product. The best radio product still uses more talent and skill than any Net-only product, and our talent pool can help us innovate and evolve in a digital world.

That being said, I am very upbeat. Terrestrial radio in and of itself isn't anywhere close to a tipping point, as you still have 90% of Americans listening through traditional means. That will continue for the foreseeable future. What radio has to do from here on out is give listeners more options to how they listen to what radio provides ...and if the product is solid, you've got a good future.