NEW JACOBS STUDY SAYS CELL PHONE USE AFFECTING ROCK RATINGS FMQB Jacobs Media has released a new study, looking at cell phone usage among Rock listeners. Over 25,000 surveys were collected from listeners to 75 stations in all Rock formats. Respondents were asked to best describe their personal phone situation, choosing from one of four different options.
Here are the main results for the poll, with the 2005 results for comparison as well:
In a span of one year, the "cell phone only" group increased by 24 percent, with 21 percent of respondents saying they only use their cell, and not a land line.
When broken down into age groups, the biggest "cell phone only" is unsurprisingly the 18-34 year-olds. As seen below, there has been a 28 percent increase in the past year among this age group. The amount of cell-only users in the 35-44 group is rising as well.
As seen below, over a third of Alternative listeners were cell-only users, up by 25 percent from 2005's statistics. Active/Mainstream Rock fans saw a similar jump. Basically one in four Rock radio listeners surveyed are now cell phone-only.
Jacobs concludes that while we have known for some time that younger, Alternative fans were increasingly becoming cell-only, older listeners, who are also Mainstream/Active fans, are also abandoning land lines too.
While Arbitron has recently addressed this issue, and will incorporate cell phone only households into their diary studies starting in 2008, this might be too little too late. Jacob says that number of cell-only homes "is increasing at an alarming rate" and that Arbitron may want to move up its timetable. They add that, "Arbitron’s ability to reach younger consumers is a well-known problem, but when more than one-third of 18-34s are 'unreachable' due to only having a cell phone, this presents a crisis for stations that are targeting this demographic." |
