As we leave one of the most tumultuous economic years in modern history, I wanted to take a look at the use of radio by two of the hardest hit sectors, Auto and Finance.
The forces acting up each of these industries is far beyond this blog, but one impact of their turmoil is on advertising and marketing. As industries that rely heavily on local customers, radio serves as a good indicator of their health but I was curious as to which moved more, how they moved together and which one made changes to their radio efforts first.
Auto and Finance have quite a lot of sub-sectors so for the purpose of this post I am just going to look at Domestic Auto Dealers and Banks & Credit Unions.
The chart below shows an index of radio advertising starting January 1, 2007 through December 15, 2008 by week. The index compares the number of ad plays for the given week against the average for the entire 102 week period.
This is just a quick visual analysis of our data and you can see though they generally trend together over the 2 years, the Dealers are much more volatile both on the high and low ends. In fact, it was not until this most recent winter that Banks exceeded the Domestic Dealers at all for any extended period of time.
I guess having bailout money in the bank helps quite a bit on the ad front.
I am just presenting our data here, not yet addressing the 'Why' behind the movements. We are always looking for the use of our data in deeper analysis, so if you have an interest in statistics, mathematics, econometrics or other quantitative analysis and have a use for deep radio data please contact us, we look forward to working with you.
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