YouTube has announced that they will no longer support 30-second ads that viewers can’t skip, starting 2018. No more. Nada. Zip. Why? A YouTube spokesman said… We’re committed to providing a better ads experience for users online. As part of that, we’ve decided to stop supporting 30-second unskippable ads as of 2018 and focus instead on formats that work well for both users and advertisers. This change will not affect shorter ads – the 20-second videos and six-second bumpers

Remember Generation X? That’s the group that’s older than Millennials yet younger than Baby Boomers. They are today’s 35-54 demographic (sizable, but smaller than Boomers or Millennials). Check out this new chart from MarketingCharts.com on what media are perceived to have persuaded purchases by Gen X during the six months prior to the survey: Quick take: Radio ads – good, old-fashioned radio ads – are, if anything, MORE influential than they were two years ago. Still, radio

So here's conventional thinking: PPM measures "real listening" while diaries record (and reward) recall and not "real listening." Not quite, I would argue. Actually, PPM measures exposure, not listening.  And diaries record the degree to which audiences are interested in the stations they consume.  That's because greater interest yields greater recall which yields more diary mentions. It seems to me we have gotten so lost in the "language of accuracy" in measurement that we h

One of radio's great problems is its inherently parochial nature. We rightly celebrate increases in revenue year-over-year without necessarily recognizing that this growth does not happen in an otherwise static environment.  And it is these very transformative changes which are making today's "100-Arbitron-share world" less relevant by the day. The bigger picture is where the advertiser plans to spend their money, regardless of the media involved. In a recent STRATA survey of