One of the biggest influencers on my career was Jeremy Coleman (presently SVP of the Howard Stern channels) who taught me a lot of moves. One of my favorited that I borrowed was drawing the poor man’s version of the graph above.
What I do (borrowed from Jeremy) is I draw a typical camel-back graph of listening with peaks in morning drive and afternoon drive…then draw the same graph over it shifted three hours to the right for Pacific time. It goes over well in the college class and in presentations.
What happens when you do that is you realize middays are just as valuable at the national level as east coast morning drive is. You get east coast middays plus Pacific morning drive and you get a nice bump.
The Nielsen graph above normalizes for timezones, but it is still interesting to me how flat the day is once you get out of the 7am hour. Also eye-catching is how early the cliff starts – it looks more like 5:30pm than say 6:30pm.
One of the things I always felt about morning drive radio, especially shows that start at 5am, is that the best stuff gets wasted when fewer people are listening. You have hosts that can’t wait to talk about the big topic so they lead with it. Sure you can do it again at 7:40, but it’s never quite the same is it?
Conversely, morning shows are tough because to me they aren’t four hour shows, they are four one hour shows and probably even eight 30 minute shows.
Interesting stuff from Nielsen if you want to dive deeper.