The station rankings are pretty consistent to the previous survey, however a few stations increased their audience tuning with others losing audience.

CHUMFM remains number 1 however with the loss of Rick on the morning show ( and soon to be, Roger), and the adjusted play list, it will be interesting to see where the station nets out in the next book.  The morning show audience has declined over the past 2 books, with CKFMFM and CHFIFM increasing their tuning in the breakfast drive period.  CHUMFM seems to be going after the younger demo of Women 18-34, at the expense of CFNYFM, CIDCFM and CFXJFM.

CJAQFM was the winner this book moving up from # 11 rank to #7 rank.  The revised JACK format is now starting to draw listeners.

CFNYFM took a big hit to the core demo of 18-34, however, still retains the top morning show for the demo. 

Recently, IMS introduced a new interface for its workhorse crosstab software, “Clear Decisions”. The response in the room was unanimously positive, with one junior planner whispering in awe “It’s….beautiful.” What’s so great about “Clear Decisions”? Lots of things: Rather than having to type in reams of coding, and sweating over whether or not your brackets are in the right place, the software lets you drag and drop your selections from the codebook half of the screen into the crosstab half, and gives you the and/or choices right on the screen. Results are displayed instantly, so no more waiting until the run is processed to see if your sample is large enough. In the “Smart Views” screen you can quickly highlight the data visually, using colour, gradients or icons. The preference in the room was for the green, yellow and red smiley faces. What does this mean for you? Since the new software operates much more like a Windows environment, users can spend less time learning how to use the system and more time delving into insights and using those insights to build strategy. Currently, only Crosstab and Cost Ranker are available in Clear Decisions: IMS plans to roll out the other modules over the next few years.

In the spirit of sharing some stunning creative for one of our clients (and to give myself a kick-start into our blogging world here!), please have a look at this British television ad for Honda/Acura. For those of you who haven’t yet seen it, prepare to be dazzled! The description accompanying this video reads as follows:

If you thought that the people who set up a room full of dominoes to have them knocked over later was amazing, you haven’t seen anything yet. There are no computer graphics or digital tricks in these images. Everything that you see happened in real time exactly as you see it. The recording required 606 takes and in the first 605 takes there always was something, usually of minor importance, that didn’t work.

It was necessary for the recording team to install the set-up time after time and it took several weeks working day and night to achieve this effect. The recording cost 6 million dollars and it took 3 months to finish, including the engineering design of the sequence. The duration of the video is only 2 minutes, but every time that Honda shows the commercial on British television, they make enough money to support any of us for the rest of our lives.

However, this commercial has turned out to be the most displayed in the history of the Internet. Honda execs think that it will pay for itself simply because of the free showings (as Honda is not paying one cent for you to see it). When Honda senior execs viewed it, they immediately approved it without hesitation-including costs.

There are only six Honda Accords built by hand in the whole world, and to the horror of Honda engineers, the recording team disassembled two of them for the recording. Everything you see in the sequence (besides the walls, floor, ramp and untouched Honda Accord) is part of those two automobiles.

The voice is that of Garrison Keiller.

The commercial was so well received by Honda execs when they saw it, that their first comment was how amazing the computer graphics were. They almost fell out of their chairs when told that the recording was real without any graphics manipulation.

By the way, about the wind shield wipers in the new Honda Accords, they are sensitive to water and designed to start working as soon as they get wet.

Enjoy!!

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