I wrote the following letter and sent it to all of the Limbaugh sponsors I could find. It attempts to appeal to the sponsors' business sense, not to their moral or political sense. If you can make a business case to pull their advertising from Limbaugh, you may make much more progress than any outrage could possibly make.
Dear Sir or Madam,
This is not a protest letter. This is a letter to inform you that the number of listeners that the representatives of The Rush Limbaugh Show have suggested your advertising will reach may be vastly overstated.
I do not pretend to be unbiased on this issue. I’m not an admirer of Mr. Limbaugh. But rather than appeal to you on a moral or political level on this issue, I have chosen merely to state facts about the immense exaggeration of Mr. Limbaugh’s listenership and let your business decision fall where it may.
Arbitron, the company that is trusted by the entire radio industry to measure ratings, for decades required their sample group to keep a diary of all the radio they listened to. This process was notoriously inaccurate. Often people would let their ratings books sit unused until the end of the month, when they would backfill from their sketchy memories what they listened to, or not fill them in at all.
This flaw was exacerbated by pockets of highly loyal listeners overstating the amount of time they spent listening to their radio heroes, logging hours in the diary far in excess of what they actually listened to, fully aware of the importance their diaries meant to the success of these radio personalities.
Unfortunately, the radio industry did not have any better way to measure their ratings, so they went along with this process for decades.
Very recently, however, Arbitron developed a device known as the Portable People Meter (PPM), which participants could actually carry on their persons without any active effort on their part. The PPM has a receiver that actually picks up the radio signal of whatever the wearer is listening to and logs it with complete accuracy.
The results of the conversion to this device on ratings has been startling. The ratings for the entire genre of Talk Radio have dropped 14% in the last year.
But the ratings for Rush Limbaugh have dropped 30%.
Consider, this is at a time when Conservative Talk Radio may be expected to be ascendant, as we head into an election year with the opposition party in the White House running for reelection, when Conservative Talk Radio is on the offense, rather than playing defense. Instead of ratings going up, Mr. Limbaugh’s ratings went down at twice the rate the median talk radio show dropped.
This may be due to a public eschewing Mr. Limbaugh’s tone and content. But given the new PPM measuring devices, it is far more likely because his audience was never as large as was previously thought, and never will be.
Consider too that Arbitron has not fully converted to the PPM device. Many of their markets still use the diaries. When the conversion to PPM is complete, over the next few years, Mr. Limbaugh’s audience may be found to be far, far smaller than anyone ever imagined.
Consider also how quickly Mr. Limbaugh’s previous advertisers deserted him. There was hardly any protest effort at all, only a brief letter-writing campaign. No one had organized any kind of actual advertiser boycott. But the advertisers left in droves almost immediately. They may have tolerated the negative association previously, but having learned that they aren’t reaching the high number of listeners they had been assured, and realizing that they had been overpaying for their advertising for years, they decided Mr. Limbaugh was not worth the toxic PR.
I’m sure you are well aware of the Mr. Limbaugh’s message and style. Perhaps you have long endorsed his message, or perhaps you are simply taking advantage of a large audience with available ad time suddenly available to you.
I only request that you have a full understanding of the highly arguable claims of the size of the listenership that Mr. Limbaugh’s ad reps have made to you. If they are charging you ad rates that assume 15 million listeners, or anything close to that, you are surely being cheated.
Thank you for your patience and attention.
Chris D’Amico
Oak Park, IL
Below please find links to the sources I used for the facts I cited. None are from partisan sites. They are all from radio industry and other business news sources.
http://www.radioinsights.com/...
http://articles.businessinsider.com/...
http://crainsnewyork.com/...
I believe this letter will be more effective on a local level than with national advertisers. I encourage any of you to use any or all of this letter in writing or e-mailing Limbaugh's sponsors in your area to make a rational business case against advertising with him any more.