The Hidden Radio Audience in Spain: Study on Children's Relationship with the Radio

Abstract

The arbitration imposed in the audience measurement systems used in Spain excludes a major swath of the population as soon as it segments the potential radio audience starting at the age of 14. Thus, the child-listener is ignored by both programming and advertising strategies. However, is this marginalisation fair? The purpose of this article is to answer this and other questions and to demonstrate to what extent the existence of the child-listener is a sufficient condition to seek mechanisms that include children in radio audience measurement systems.

Notes

*Even though these subjects are mentioned a total of 64 times, only 52 subjects offered further information on them. The presence of a higher number of mentions can be explained by the fact that some children mentioned more than one way in which they use the radio (two or more).

¹AIMC figures, 2009 EGM sample. Information available in http://www.aimc.es

²This huge gap within the EGM was most likely what drove the AIMC itself to launch the Study on the Child/Teen Audience in Media in Spain (Estudio de audiencia infantil/juvenil de medios en España), which was designed to study the relationships between young people aged 8 to 13 and the media. The method used is also the personal interview, and the sample includes 3,992 interviews. Four editions of this study have been conducted, in 1998, 2002, 2004, and 2008. However, the tool used in radio advertising planning is still the EGM.

³Quotation from Cristopher Dal, President of CBC, in Petrozzello (1996) “Children's radio: a format whose time has come” in Broadcasting & Cable, Vol. 126, no. 42, p. 66.

⁴According to the National Statistical Institute (INE), in 2009 there will be 1,369 births per day, meaning that the birth rate will reach its highest point since 1983.

⁵In addition to the authors of this article, Publiradio is a group made up of UAB professors José María Ricarte, Margarida Blanch and Ana María Enrique. The group has an educational website, www.publiradio.net. In 2009, Publiradio earned recognition as an emerging research group from the regional government of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya, SGR2009-0454), with the name of the Research Group in Radio Advertising and Communication (Grup de Recerca en Publicitat i Comunicació Radiofònica).

⁶As part of a more sweeping study on The Radio as a Means of Social Integration: Development of an Instrument to Measure Excluded Audiences for Holding Institutional Campaigns of Social Interest (La radio como medio de integración social: desarrollo de un instrumento de medición de audiencias excluidas para la realización de campañas institucionales de interés social), financed by the Ministry of Education and Science from 2005 to 2008 (SEJ2005-07853).

⁷Practically all the children who defined the radio as a device or a kind of medium then went on to relate it to music and the news. The conceptualisation offered in quotation marks is a standard definition and does not imply that the entire sample defined it the same way.

⁸The less frequently mentioned terms, like buttons, volume, earphones, loudspeakers, square, or car, were not included in the word map.

⁹It is logical to conclude that in these cases, the children are not listening on their own initiative, rather they access the broadcast contents through other people (their parents, grandparents, etc.), particularly when they are in the car on their way to and from home and school.

¹⁰The figures differ from those shown in Table 2, as the former compiles the results in which the subject referred explicitly to “I use the radio for this.” Here, any mention of the genres that appear throughout the essays is included.

¹¹The radio manages to be closer to the consumer. The relationship that this medium forges with the listener is tinged with an intimacy that is not found in other media. Plus, the radio audience for a given broadcaster or station creates ties that display a high degree of loyalty (Barbeito & Fajula, 2005).