Problems Getting Smart Speakers to Play
a Radio Station?

Good News: More homes have Smart Speakers. Our latest NuVoodoo Ratings Prospects Study, fielded in January across all PPM markets, shows Smart Speaker penetration is up to 43% among 14-54's.

Not shown here is that penetration is even deeper among those likely to end up in a Nielsen sample. Additionally, a prime placement for Smart Speakers is turning out to be the bedroom. Because of the ubiquity of the clock radio, the bedroom was home turf for radio once upon a time. But clock radios are now about as common as rotary phones.

We know that many Smart Speaker owners have at least occasionally listened to a favorite local FM station on their devices, but we see that listening to digital pureplays on Smart Speakers is gaining traction.

Spurred by verbatim comments picked up in client studies in the past year, we asked Smart Speakers owners to agree or disagree with this statement: "I've had problems when asking smart speakers to play one of my favorite AM or FM stations" - and 46% of Smart Speaker owners agree. That's a lot of potential occasions snubbed out because the Alexa couldn't find what they were asking for or played the wrong thing.

Looking at the data, Mike O'Connor, NuVoodoo's EVP of Marketing remarked, "Jeff Bezos recently touted Alexa's improved ability to understand requests and answer questions, proudly announcing that the number of learned skills had doubled to over 80,000 worldwide. In the face of this this tectonic shift in audio distribution, radio station listeners have identified a "skill gap" when attempting to access their favorite radio station. These data say to the industry, "Drop everything and address this - NOW!"

We'll dive deeper into Smart Speaker penetration in the first installment of our Spring 2019 Webinar Series starting on Tuesday, February 19 at Noon Eastern (with four more opportunities to participate through Monday, March 4th).  In addition to Smart Speakers, this first webinar episode will give you the latest information on:

• The advertising channels that likely ratings respondents pay attention to.
• Marketing messages and tactics that have prompted likely ratings respondents to listen more.
• How digital ads, phone calls or mail from a station might impact the listening of likely ratings respondents.
• The Social Media platforms that are used most by panelists and diary keepers.
• Whether increasing data privacy concerns are enough to cause likely ratings respondents to seek alternatives to Facebook.

As a broadcast journalism major at Penn State University, Carolyn Gilbert served as WQWK's first female jock before moving on to Cincinnati and WWEZ, WEBN, an audio production company... and two little kids sent to hone her management skills. Her research career started when she launched Critical Mass Media in the 80's, which she grew from 3 employees to over 700, serving every major broadcasting group. Eventually, Critical Mass became an "in house" provider of services for the 1200 Clear Channel radio stations, and Carolyn served as President. Following a stint as EVP/Research and Inside Sales for Tribune, Carolyn teamed with friends (and best in class) Mike O'Connor, Leigh Jacobs and Marc Chase to form NuVoodoo in 2010, providing innovative products that work within 2012 budgets and deliver results. "Because that's the way we've always done it," has become a forbidden sentence.

Leigh fell in love with radio in 8th grade, got deeply involved in his high school's 10-watt FM station a year later and never recovered. After 20 years in the business, including 16 years as a program director, he joined Critical Mass Media as a perceptual analyst in 1999. Across nearly a decade at Critical Mass, Leigh designed and analyzed hundreds of studies for stations in all formats.