Programmers spend most of their time sweating the details of what happens between the commercials. They obsess over personality content, clock sequencing, music rotations, imaging, sweepers, transitions. But what about the commercials themselves? Many think there’s not much you can do about it because, well, sales, right? Others agonize over tweaking the clocks to suck an extra quarter-hour of listening credit wherever possible. Commercials make up a high percentage of your programming. If you play 12 minutes of spots per hour, that’s 20% of programming. So it makes sense to make smart decisions about where the spots play, which has a profound psychological effect on listeners. And if you get it wrong, you’re sending them away… and they’re not coming back when you think they are. Let’s unpack the psychology of stop set placement and how you can put this science to work.
Optimize For Nielsen: The Psychology of Stop Set Placement
