The Capital Radio Impact Study 1987

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An expensive and immensely thorough piece of research conducted by Capital Radio which successfully managed to answer the question "A radio impact is cheaper - but is it cost effective?"

The method was essentially very simple. Viewers of TV-am, viewers of Thames/LWT and listeners to Capital Radio were telephoned during peak viewing or listening hours, and asked

a) availability - whether they were listening/viewing in the time segment when the specified ads were on

b) prompted recall - whether they could recall seeing/hearing ads for the specified brands.

In order to compare like with like, the study devised a new currency for measuring the impact of ads - "Proven Recall Ratings" or PRRs. This involved taking all the people who could have seen/heard the ad, and comparing the number who actually recalled it. So if 300 people could have seen it, but only 100 said "Yes I remember that ad", the PRR score was 33.3.

A very substantial sample of about 150-200 different ads were scored in each medium over a fortnight, with a sample of over 700 respondents, and the relative average scores were as follows:

This led Capital to the happy conclusion that, in terms of generating prompted recall, radio is about 80% as effective as TV. Pretty good for a medium that is one-third of the price. Media departments were less than enthusiastic to take this on board, doubtless with an eye to the next round of price negotiations....

Two important further conclusions also emerged:

the range of recall scores for the radio ads was significantly wider than for TV - the difference in effectiveness between the better and worse ads was greater

"Most radio ads use single voice and product demonstration, even though those with dialogue and those with mood/fantasy achieve higher impact"