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Are You Ready?
December 22, 2025
Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash
Whether your title is Operations Manager, Program Director, Chief Content Officer, or whatever labels are put on the traditional PD role, this is likely not the most wonderful time of the year for you. Not that you don’t enjoy the holiday season. It’s the holiday prep that can bog you down. With most of the business world about to check out for five or more days, you’re tasked with the awesome responsibility of planning ahead.
Are all the shifts covered by people, either live or voice tracked? Is all the imaging properly time stamped so we don’t run a “Merry Christmas” sweeper on December 26th? Is traffic on their toes for this, as well? Nothing like running that “last minute gift idea” spot the day after Christmas. Let’s not forget the days upon days of music logs you need to feed into the system. I’m sure that this only scratches the surface of your pre-holiday checklist.
Let’s add one more thing to look forward to. If you’re in a PPM market, your December numbers start pouring in on December 30th. So, while you’re catching up on everyone’s holiday, putting out the inevitable fires that arose and weeding through hundreds of e-mails—you have to download your data. And set up your reports. And then comb through them to see if Santa put you on the naughty or nice list.
Let’s be honest. The December survey is likely the least important one of the gang of thirteen. Unless you are the home of the holiday hits, you’ll probably have a disappointing month. That doesn’t mean the data isn’t worth mining. Especially if you have access to our Exact Age and Hot Zip reports. You would be able to track where the Santa station went up by age cell and geography while comparing that to your losses. All Christmas stations generally do not attract new cume to the medium. They just cause a major reshuffling of the deck chairs. Our reports will help you determine where you were hit. They will also enable you to see if/when those listeners come back. But back to that time crunch thing. Adding our Ratings Experts to your team will save you all that downloading, sorting, and analyzing “time spent.”
Have a great holiday. We hope you spend it with the people you love. Laugh a lot. Eat too much. And when the dust settles in January, give us a call. We can make 2026 much easier for you.
-Steve Allan, Programming Research Consultant
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