The Radio Ad Bureau (RAB), a trade marketing body for radio, has released “Media and the Mood of the Nation,” a document they’re referring to as a study.
According to RAB, respondents to their survey recorded a 100 percent increase in happiness when listening to the radio, compared to not consuming any type of media at all. RAB surveyed 1,000 people in Great Britain to collect this data.
Certainly the Radio Ad Bureau has nothing to gain by developing a biased questionnaire comprising a number of leading questions about how great the radio-listening experience is—and then using it to conduct “research.” Nowhere on their website is there any detail on how their study was conducted.
I’m sure this isn’t the most blatant example of this sort of publicity strategy but it’s really sticking in my craw today. The worst part is that The Telegraph, The Daily Mail and American Public Media’s Marketplace blog among others covered its publication—and they all did so with a straight face, presenting it as useful information. (You can see The Telegraph's story here.)
I don’t fault RAB for it on one level: it seems to have been fairly effective—especially if you believe that there’s no such thing as bad press, but are news outlets that bereft of real news? To run news articles on this “study”—really? Do these publications have that many readers who are that lacking in critical thinking skills?
From a less agitated perspective, this approach is not so different than what content farms are doing to play the search engines, cranking out “content” purely to draw eyeballs to pages full of ads. I just wonder that the RAB isn’t embarrassed to present their schlocky report.
Probably their marketing department would say, "our site traffic and mentions in the press are up," in other words, the ends justify the means. I’d say, credibility is becoming a powerful differentiator.
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