Each week, according to Nielsen, 59.8% of Fayetteville, North Carolina consumers watch video programs that aren't delivered over-the-air by local TV stations.  They aren't coming from a local cable company or by satellite.  Instead, these programs are being streamed directly to viewers via an internet connection.

This type of streamed video content is called OTT (Over-The-Top-Television) or CTV (Connected-Television). These two terms are sometimes are often used interchangeably but do have a subtle difference.

OTT generally means the video is watched on a small device like a computer, tablet, or smartphone.  CTV, on the other hand, typically means the content is viewed on a smart-TV or a regular television using a streaming device like a Roku or Amazon stick.

In Fayetteville, OTT/CTV has exceeded the weekly reach of local newspapers and streaming audio services such as Pandora and Spotify. The medium is rapidly approaching the reach of local cable and broadcast TV stations.

Fayetteville, North Carolina area residents will begin receiving economic stimulus checks  from the Internal Revenue Service as early as today.  In all, local consumers will receive more than $550 million in payments.

This infusion of cash into the Fayetteville economy was authorized by Congress last week in the American Rescue Plan legislation. 

The stimulus relief legislation calls for a one-time payment of $1,400 to single adults. Married couples who filed jointly will receive $2,800 total ($1,400 apiece). Families will get an additional $1,400 for each eligible dependent regardless of age. A family of four could get $5,600 in total payments. Like the second round of stimulus payments, the third round specifically prohibits payments to anyone who died before January 1, 2020.

Many of the stimulus dollars will end up in the wallets of 104,000 Fayetteville area homeowners. Based on research from Modernize, a leader in the home improvement and home services industry, 57% of these consumers are planning to spend all or part of their checks on home improvement projects.

Since 1921, advertising on Fayetteville, radio has helped North Carolina small business owners survive and thrive during times of peril. This includes world wars, natural disasters, depressions, and recessions.

Even during a pandemic, by almost every key marketing metric, radio advertising remains the best way for a Fayetteville business to market its goods and services.

To prove the point, here are five statistics that vividly demonstrate the value of advertising on Fayetteville radio.

There are 179,200 adult women in the Fayetteville, North Carolina area. Based on research from the Harvard Business Review, as a consumer group, females account for 70-80 percent of all consumer purchasing through a combination of their buying power and influence.  According to Nielsen, this will amount to between $6.1 billion and $6.9 billion this year.

Overall, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the US Census Bureau:

• Single women across all income brackets spend, on average, $34,817 on goods and service
• Working married women contribute over a third of their families’ incomes
• Over a quarter (29.4%) of wives earned more than their husbands in 2018, an increase from 15.9% in 1981.

Furthermore, according to research published by Forbes:

• The top homebuyers after married couples are single women (18%, double the percentage for single men at 9%).
• Women are 50% more likely than men to regularly watch online how-to videos.
• 94% of women between the ages of 15-35 spend over an hour per day shopping online.
• 70% of travel consumers are women.
• 85% of women say that if they like a brand, they will remain loyal to it.

For Fayetteville small business owners to successfully capture a meaningful share of the local female economy requires advertising.

Fayetteville, North Carolina's first radio station, WFNC-AM, began broadcasting in 1939.  The process of getting the station's programming from the studio into the home of local listeners required tall-transmitting towers with miles of underground copper wire in the middle of massive fields.

For the next 54 years, this massive investment in real estate, steel, and cooper was the only method of delivering a radio advertiser's message into the ears of Fayetteville consumers.

In 1993, however, new technology permitted Fayetteville radio stations to augment the reach of their tall towers by simultaneously streaming its over-the-air programming via the internet. This provided local consumers with the choice of listening to their favorite stations on their car radios, clock radios, and boom boxes or on an internet connected devices like computers, smartphones, or tablets.

Today, based on estimates from Edison Research, 11% of listening to local radio stations occurs on a streaming media device.  The ability for AM/FM to migrate from their tall towers to internet streaming allows Fayetteville radio to reach more local consumers every week than all other media.

Local radio came to North Carolina on March 18, 1922. That's when the Federal Radio Commission granted a license to the Southern Radio Corporation with the randomly assigned call sign, WBT.

From that day, many predicted radio's success would succumb to advances from new technologies. In 1927, the challenge came from talking movies. In the 1940s, the predators were 13-inch TV sets. In the 1970s, it was 8-track and cassette tapes. In the past 20 years, there was a multi-flank attack from iPods, Zunes, YouTube, Sirius, XM, Pandora, Spotify,

So far, all of these challengers have failed. Not even a pandemic has been able to remove radio as a vital force in the life of Fayetteville consumers.

Every week, according to Nielsen, more adults tune-in to Fayetteville radio than watch TV or cable. Use social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram. Read newspapers. Or, stream music from Pandora or Spotify.

How important is Twitter to Fayetteville area consumers? Yesterday, for instance, the social media platform was mentioned in at least ten articles published by the Fayetteville Observer yesterday.  Almost every local TV newscast included references to the site as well.

Twitter's outsized presence in the news, however, is enormously disproportional to the importance of the micro-blogging app in the life of Fayetteville's consumers.

According to Nielsen, only about 16% of adults in Fayetteville use Twitter during the course of a month. This is minuscule compared to other social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

Twitter offers 20 different options that North Carolina small business owners can utilize to market their goods and services to local consumers.  The platform's minimal reach, however, can hamper the success of any advertising campaign.

The first radio station in Fayetteville, WFNC, was granted a license from the Federal Radio Commission in 1939. The owner was Wall Christian Ewing who, at the time, also owned a wholesale fertilizer business in the city. He had also been the Chairman of the Cumberland County Democratic Party. and had spent time serving in the North Carolina legislature.

For almost 80 years, North Carolina business owners have depended on local radio stations to successfully market their goods and services through depressions, recessions, wars, and natural disasters. Even now, during a pandemic, advertising on Fayetteville radio remains a dependable way to make cash registers ring.

Here are five facts every Fayetteville small business owner needs to know about local radio in 2020.

There are 66,000 adults in the Fayetteville area who have earned a four-year college or postgraduate degree, according to research from Nielsen. A study from the Federal Reserve indicates that these educated consumers have been least affected by the economic consequences of the pandemic.

"While the labor market disruptions have affected workers in a wide set of industries and occupations, those without a college degree have experienced the most severe impact," say Mary C. Daly, Shelby R. Buckman, and Lily M. Seitelman authors of The Unequal Impact of COVID-19 in the Economic Letter published by the Federal Reserve of San Francisco.

Although the unemployment rate increased among consumers of every education level in late March when the Governor of North Carolina locked down the state to slow the spread of the Coronavirus, the smallest increase was among those with bachelor or postgraduate degrees, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics..

Seven months later, job recovery among those with college degrees is closer to pre-pandemic levels than consumers with lower levels of educational attainment.

Many small business owners have seen the correlation between advertising and survival during the economic crisis inflicted by the pandemic.  With precious few dollars to invest, it is crucial that every advertisement reaches consumers who have disposable income to buy. Right now, the most likely spenders are customers with college degrees.

By key advertising metrics, the best way to reach consumers with higher education is on Fayetteville radio.

Fayetteville shoppers are expected to spend a record $1.1 billion online in 2020, based on the most recent projections from eMarketer. This would represent year-over-year growth of 32.4%.

During the same period, according to eMarketer, receipts at brick-and-mortar stores have contracted by 3.2%.  Overall, excluding gas and auto sales, e-commerce will account for 20.6% of all retail sales this year.

The Coronavirus pandemic is credited with this seismic shift in shopping behavior as consumers continue to avoid stores and opt for online shopping.

“We’ve seen e-commerce accelerate in ways that didn’t seem possible last spring, given the extent of the economic crisis,” said Andrew Lipsman, eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. “While much of the shift has been led by essential categories like grocery, there has been surprising strength in discretionary categories like consumer electronics and home furnishings that benefited from pandemic-driven lifestyle needs.”

Even before the onset of the pandemic, 71.8% of Fayetteville consumers had bought goods online over the prior six months, according to Nielsen research. Purchases included clothing, health & beauty products, travel reservations, books, furniture, and groceries.

Before we explain AVOD, it is important to understand SVOD.

Fayetteville small business owners may not be familiar with SVOD, but chances are they let it into their homes and onto their phones.

SVOD is the abbreviation for Subscription Video On Demand. That is the collective name for streaming networks like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Amazon Prime.  For a monthly fee, these services provide commercial-free access to TV shows, original content, and movies.

These SVOD networks are delivered to viewers' phones, tablets, computers, and smart-TVs via the internet and not over-the-air or cable systems.

SVOD makes up a significant part of what advertisers refer to as OTT (Over-The-Top-Television) and CTV (Connected-Television). OTT/CTV is video-programming content that viewers can only watch on smartphones, tablets, computers, smart-TVs, Amazon Firesticks, and Roku Sticks.  Nielsen reports that 94.2% of Fayetteville adults own at least one of these devices.

Fayetteville area business owners are expected to spend $6.1million on newspaper advertising in 2020. This will be 35.8% fewer dollars than were spent in 2019, according to a study by Borrell Associates, a company that analyzes local media expenditures across the country.

Of course, the pandemic is part of the reason advertising revenues have plummeted at Fayetteville newspapers. But, the more significant factor is the sustained erosion of readership.

For example, between October 2017 and March 2019, the Monday-Saturday circulation of the Fayetteville Observer has decreased by 46%. The Sunday edition suffered a 49% decrease.

Among all advertising media available to small business owners, newspaper's ability to reach adult consumers now lags significantly behind Fayetteville radio, cable, broadcast TV, and social media.

There are more than 267,000 vehicles registered in the Fayetteville area. Many need new windshield wipers, shocks, struts, brakes, air filters, ignition coils, and the hundreds of other items that fill the shelves of local auto part dealers.

Despite the pandemic induced slowdown, business at auto parts stores has grown nearly 13% since February, according to the US Census Bureau.

This explosive growth in auto parts sales directly relates to the  average age of cars on Fayetteville's roads.

"Per the latest study from IHS Markit, the current combined average age of vehicles has hit a record of 11.9 years," Rimmi Singhi wrote this week on NASDAQ.com. "The aging vehicles are a boon to auto parts, replacement, and repair companies. In a bid to ensure long-term functioning of the aging vehicle population, customers are making investments to replace faulty vehicle parts and components."

Also contributing to the rapid aging of cars on the road is the current demand for used versus new vehicles. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) for used cars is 25% higher in August than it was during the same month last year.

There are approximately 66,000 households in the Fayetteville area with existing mortgages, according to the US Census Bureau, American Housing Survey. The median amount owed on these homes is $127,000.

Yesterday, there was extraordinary news for many of these borrowers and for Fayetteville area banks, credit unions, and mortgage companies

According to The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), mortgage rates have hit an all-time low of 2.86%.

Advertising on local television and cable is becoming less attractive to Fayetteville business owners as viewers rapidly defect to alternative video entertainment sources including, Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Amazon and Disney+.

Collectively these streaming services are referred to as Over-The-Top Television (OTT) and Connected-TV (CTV). Viewers can only access this OTT and CTV content via smartphone, tablets, computers, smart-TVs, Amazon Fire Sticks, and Roku Sticks, Nielsen reports that 94.2% of Fayetteville adults own at least one these devices. Furthermore, they are using them.

According to Nielsen, OTT and CTV networks now reaches 42.3% of all Fayetteville consumers every week.