More on the clutter data

Remember a week or so ago I gave a "brownbag" colloquium talk to the telecommunications faculty, which was the latest experiment done in the ICR about the cognitive and emotional effects of commercial clutter in radio. I realize that I had promised to post some results for you audio prof blog cruisers.

So rather than overwhelm you all dribble a little bit of this out over the next couple of days. I'll start out for basic description of what we did, and then maybe tomorrow I'll even share some data with you -- something I've promised,like I said, over a week ago! Oh, and by the way, two graduate students in the ICR have been really helpful and instrumental in this study: Brian Wilson and Ashley Sanders-Jackson.

Of course, the initial impetus of this goes back almost 5 years ago now, long before Clear Channel announced their interest in "less is more". It's just that since this large corporate owner has started reducing the amount of advertising time per hour on their stations -- my work is somewhat in vogue. Unfortunately, the latest set of results from an experiment I've called "double the units" has not been as positive toward Clear Channel strategic moves as earlier work.

Besides eliminating the total minutes of commercials per hour, Clear Channel has tried to single-handedly pushed the advertising world, kicking and screaming away from using 60 -- second commercials toward using 30-second spots. Along with this move, it seemed to us, came the temptation to perhaps leave the duration of your stops at consistent and nearly double the number of units.. so that's what we did in this experiment, using CHR songs that were systematically ordered into four different orders.

Well, rather than try and spelled this all out, when I just go here and see some slides from the presentation.