The Faithful WOWO Radio Listeners

Time to lay the groundwork for advertising on WOWO Radio.  This is the place that has been my work home since the end of 2013. Today I’m kicking off the summer of 2015 version of Advertising with WOWO Radio.

I’m 55.  Technically I am a baby boomer, the generation born after World War 2.  The Baby Boomer years are thought of as 1946 through 1964, so I’m on the tail end of that group.   I bring this up because my generation makes up a significant part of the WOWO audience.  And that is good.  WOWO is now 90 years old and it is a much different station than when it began.  There is even a website that chronicles the history of WOWO.

When I was a kid in the 60’s and 70’s I woke up to WOWO to see if we had school delays.  I listened at night for the music and sillyness that Ron Gregory provided as a WOWO Air Ace.

It’s funny because I’m now friends with Ron and just had lunch with him and a mutual friend a few months ago.

For the past 2 decades WOWO has been a news/talk radio station at 1190am and a few years ago added 92.3fm as a way for listeners to tune in.

Last week I saw this story from Mediapost:

Boomers Are Listening by Spencer Brown
Remember when radio was our only audio source for news, sports and, of course, music discovery? Eighty million or more American boomers listened to radio. Our favorite DJs. The latest hits. The big ball game. And then it became portable! The transistor radio changed our lives. For the first time, we could listen to the radio at the beach or in the park. Well, things have certainly changed.

In the last 10 years, audio consumption has fragmented. But if you think this means radio has become less important in the media landscape, think again. Radio, perhaps the original mass medium, continues to play a big part in the lives of Americans everywhere—with 243 million Americans listening weekly. That means more than 91% of Americans (age 12 or older) are tuning in each week, according to Nielsen.

For advertisers keen to reach the boomer audience, those who continue to listen to radio longer than anyone else, radio delivers a mass audience in real-time across markets large and small.
Audio continues to appeal to the boomer crowd, ages 50-64. According to Nielsen, 57.9 million use radio each week, that’s 93.5% of boomers! And while Generation Y (ages 35-49) is a close second, boomers spend an average of 15 hours, 6 minutes each week with radio (that’s the most of any demo). Older listeners make up the biggest cohort of news/talk/information’s audience of more than 58 million people.
Let’s not forget that boomers account for nearly $230 billion in sales for consumer packaged good; they control nearly 70 percent of the nation’s disposal income and they stand to inherit $15 trillion in the next 20 years.  As they get older, this is a population that will have more time, not less, to listen to the radio, online and over the air.

In the chart above, it shows the national demographic composition of News/Talk Radio (like WOWO) listeners.

I began listening to News/Talk  Radio 30 years ago when I lived in Detroit.  That’s about the age that a lot of people start listening to News/Talk radio, no matter what generation you belong to.  But that’s for another day.  Like tomorrow, when I will give you some of the details of the audience composition of WOWO.