Here's What A Live Focus Group Said At Talk Show Boot Camp

What if you conducted a live focus group of listeners in front of a room of talk radio managers, consultants, programmers and hosts?

No mirrors. No video cameras. Nothing between the panelists and the seasoned talk radio professionals. NuVoodoo did it in Atlanta for Talk Show Boot Camp 2015 and did again March 5 at Talk Show Boot Camp 2016 in Ft. Lauderdale.

Last year in Atlanta, the panelists were talk listeners, ages 35-54. This time, according to The Mouth/JockLine Daily, the panelists were a screened group of five men and four women, 25-40, who were active radio listeners from South Florida who showed strong interest in spoken-word programming and spent significant time using radio, including terrestrial.

The stage was set up as though the nine respondents were panelists in a typical conference session. And, that’s exactly what they were.

Some key takeaways from the session conducted by Carolyn Gilbert & Leigh Jacobs of NuVooDoo included:

• TV remains the winner at home in the morning. Interesting sound with non-essential pictures gets GMA and/or Today on in the homes of many. Terrestrial radio has the leg up in the car, but there’s plenty of competition even then and there.
• Experience with connected cars was slim, one of the women referring to her husband’s internet-connected car as very confusing. Many had experience with SiriusXM, but only a couple were paying for it currently. Howard Stern was the key programming of interest to some of the panelists, the multiple music channels of the service now less interesting in the face of many streaming music options.
• Most panelists were active Pandora users. There was a smaller, overlapping group of Spotify users. None, however, were paying for a commercial-free experience from either provider. Despite being screened to be regular podcast users, under the weight of dozens of professionals staring back at them, stories of actual podcast usage dwindled to only a few on the panel. NPR’s podcast initiatives earned it praise and additional time spent among those few. Beyond NPR, there was no central theme of how podcasts were discovered or used.
• Among men, Sports radio earned some mention as programming they used often. There were scattered mentions of South Florida talk radio stations, but there seemed to be more affinity for some talkative morning show hosts on FM music stations. RAB President, Erica Farber, asked the panelists about NextRadio. They had no real knowledge of NextRadio and not much more about HD Radio. Those who had or had seen HD Radios believed the new technology to be about sound quality and had no idea about the prospect of additional channels being available. There was wide interest in local and hyper-local information.

It should go without saying, this was a focus group, albeit an unusual one. It’s qualitative and not quantitative research. With a sample of nine, there’s no reliable way to project these results to a wider population. But, given the speed with which the media landscape is changing, this information gives us deeper insight into listeners and helps us to ask better and more relevant questions.

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