By Scott Westerman
From the Legend page at keener13.com: “..for WKNR, it was the right time, the right elements and the right place, and for an all-too-brief period it was Camelot.”
Whenever I see the distinctive red, white and green logo from Bob Green Productions on a package, I know I’m in for a treat. In the seven years since keener13.com was born, Bob has been the project’s biggest cheerleader and contributor.
Once such gem arrived in my mailbox last week. It was a qualitative breakdown of the radio listening habits in Detroit during December and January of 1964-65.
This was the height of WKNR’s popularity. All the formatic details had been polished. And the on-air line-up that would be remembered as the quintessential Keener team was finding its center. In short, if you had to take a snapshot of WKNR at her best, this was the time.
The company that did the research was Pulse, a New York based radio research firm that specialized in face to face data gathering techniques that took interviewers door to door across Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. Then, as now, a microcosm of the overall audience was surveyed, just 1,034 households, with the results impressed across a broader universe to determine listening habits.
What stands out is Keener’s dominance as an advertising medium, regularly delivering listener ratings in the upper 20s and low 30s across just about every demographic dissection. Some factoids:
27.3% of all households surveyed listened to WKNR.
42.6% of three car households listened to WKNR.
3 in 10 Ford owners listened to Keener.
6 in 10 Rambler owners listened to Keener.
Department store shoppers preferred WKNR in droves.
46% of those surveyed had Federals charge accounts.
50% of those surveyed had charge accounts at E.J. Korvettes.
WKNR had a 20 share or higher across almost all occupational categories, ranking particularly high in executive and union-based professions.
WKNR had significant market share across all income demographics, playing particularly well at the upper end of the spectrum. 36.2% of those making the equivalent of $200,000 dollars a year were Keener listeners.
Our readers who are still in the radio business today would kill for 1/4 of these numbers.
And what a difference a decade makes. Ten years earlier (1955) was the decline of radio’s golden age. There was still long form programming across many day parts and Television had started its inexorable march to prominence with radio listenership spiraling downward.
Ten years later WKNR was history.
Link: Pulse Detroit Qualitative 1 December 1964-January 1965 (53mb PDF – Pretty big file!)
