Jim Giddings, general manager of Lustine Toyota Scion Dodge in Woodbridge, sees that as progress.
Every month his dealership spends $90,000 on radio advertising. For years, he spent $25,000 on one talk-personality station and another $25,000 on a contemporary music station. Both were recommended by his advertising agency, which consulted ratings from Arbitron Inc.'s research team in Columbia, Md.
Car dealers, many of whom have embraced the MobilTrak radio device, above, believe that 80 percent of their business is with customers who live or work within 10 miles of a car lot.
(Mobiltrak Inc.)
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Arbitron tracks listening habits by asking small, random samples of people in the nation's major broadcast markets to keep daily diaries. It is the arbiter of how much stations can charge for commercials based on the estimated number of listeners and the demographics those stations attract.
But when Giddings signed on with MobilTrak two months ago, he found that Arbitron's top two stations didn't even rank in the top 10 for in-car radio listeners driving past his dealership. So he shifted his budget, allotting the most money to a news show and a contemporary music station identified as popular by MobilTrak.
"It was a real eye-opener," he said. But is MobilTrak helping him attract more customers? "I don't know yet," he said. "I'll have a better idea 90 days from now maybe."
Thom Mocarsky, a spokesman for Arbitron, described MobilTrak as "complementary" to Arbitron's wide variety of services.
"MobilTrak tells you what your selection of stations should be but it doesn't tell you how many people you are reaching and what you should pay for it," Mocarsky said. "The station with the biggest audience is not necessarily the best buy for a particular advertiser."
A drawback to MobilTrak, Mocarsky said, is that it captures only radio listening in cars, which accounts for 33 percent of all radio listening. Another third of radio listening takes place at work and the rest is done at home. Also, MobilTrak captures only FM stations. But MobilTrak counters that research shows there's no indication that preferences are different at home than in the car. The company also said it plans to introduce technology that picks up AM and satellite station signals next spring.
MobilTrak was founded in Alabama in 1998 by Jim Christian, who once owned the software firm TapScan, which interpreted ratings from radio and TV stations.
Christian, a former radio deejay, sold TapScan to Arbitron in 1998 and sank $10 million to $15 million of his own money into developing MobilTrak's technology, said Boice, the company's managing partner.
