Ratings Are Life

April 30, 2026

You’ve probably heard of Roy Williams, aka The Wizard of Ads. You may not know he does a weekly “Monday Morning Memo” that is a must subscribe. This week’s memo, A Line of Standing Dominoes, focused on ratings and the Nielsen/Cumulus skirmish. Here are a few highlights from that memo:

Image by Ron Lach, Pexels.com

There are 6,602 FM radio stations in America, 597 FM stations in Canada, and 234 in Australia on which you can air radio ads for local businesses. These radio stations are producing miraculous results for business owners who hire great ad writers to enchant the audience and savvy media buyers to schedule those ads to air with correct repetition 52 weeks a year.

Sadly, most business owners do exactly the wrong thing. They run short schedules to “test the waters,” and then announce, “I tried radio and it didn’t work.”

Williams applies the same logic to television. Then he zings the digital ecosphere:

Anyone who believes that online media has made mass media obsolete is comically delusional. I never waste time attempting to correct these people.

In the last week we have seen positive news about the state of radio from both Edison Research and Jacobs Media. Is radio in the same position as it was 15 years ago? Absolutely not. Is radio still a viable medium for both entertainment and advertising? Absolutely!

Radio does have its issues. The core audience is aging. The competition for attention continues to expand. And the car—radio’s last big fortress—is under siege.

What radio does have in abundance is credibility. Advertisers do not re-up their schedules because they don’t work. Listeners keep tuning in because radio is free and—when at its best—fills an emotional need.

All of this depends on ratings. Nielsen is our currency. It has its flaws but until there is a better system we need to not only embrace it but tout its viability.

Digital attribution is always the counterweight to this. That system is also flawed but contains one thing radio does not—fraud. Imagine if radio ran spots no one could hear (digital ads count even when they are not actually seen). Imagine if PPM or diaries were filled out by bots (two words: bot farms).

Digital has its place. So does radio. We may be old, but to paraphrase Monty Python—we’re not dead yet.

Feel free to tell me I’m full of it: sallan@researchdirectorinc.com

PS: Here’s what Roy Williams said about the Cumulus/Nielsen thing:

We will now return to the dominoes.

1. Nielsen Audio is the media measurement company that allows savvy media buyers to create miraculous radio schedules. Without Nielsen, they are flying blind without instruments and very likely to crash their flying machines.
2. Cumulus owns multiple radio stations in 84 important cities in the U.S. Their current financial difficulties make it impossible for them to pay Nielsen for their measurement services.
3. Nielsen has responded by announcing that Cumulus radio stations will no longer be measured or listed in future ratings reports.
4. The resulting invisibility of those stations will cripple even the savviest media buyers.
5. An emerging measurement system, DTS AutoStage, shows promise but I remain convinced that it will be at least a few more years before it has sufficient breadth of data to replace Nielsen.

The finger of Nielsen is flicking the domino that will knock over the other 6,602 dominoes in the chain that will ultimately result in the demise of Nielsen.

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