Pay-TV is struggling to survive COVID-19.

Before the onset of the pandemic, Nielsen reported that 60% of Fayetteville area households received their television programs from cable systems, telephone companies, or satellite operators.  That number, however, is plummeting.

Pay-TV providers in the Fayetteville area include AT&T TV, Dish, Spectrum, and DirecTV.

"Cord-cutting, people dropping their cable and satellite TV subscriptions, pre-dates the onset of Covid-19. But the pandemic is exaggerating the trend, creating deeper issuers for programming that relies on those services for distribution," Eric Savitz wrote last week in Barron's.  This includes non-premium services like ESPN, TBS, TNT, USA, CNN, and Discovery.

"LightShed Partners analyst Richard Greenfield counts a loss of 1.96 million subscribers to cable, satellite TV, and virtual cable services combined in the first quarter," Savitz continued. "This is the worst combined quarterly drop ever, down 6% from a year ago."

Greenfield said in an interview with Barron’s that what is especially sobering is that most of the first quarter activity pre-dated the virus. The numbers are likely to get considerably worse in the second quarter.

There is alarming news for small business owners who advertise on Fayetteville area television stations: broadcast TV viewers are disappearing at a rapid pace.

Nielsen reports that halfway through the first quarter of this year, the number of people using television has dropped 7.5%. This compares to -6.3% in the fourth quarter of 2019, and -7.0% a year ago,

"If the trend holds, it would represent the largest quarterly decline for TV viewership in our data set," explains UBS analyst John C. Hodulikadding. "Trends have worsened across most age demos with persons 25-34 now falling -17% vs. low double-digit declines throughout 2019. The persons 55+ demo continues to trend down -2%, similar to 2019 (the first year of declining ratings for the demo)."

Radio listenership, on the other hand, has remained quite stable, according to Nielsen. Since 1970, the medium has reached more than 9-in-10 consumers every week.

Small business owners who sell mattresses in the Fayetteville area might be losing sleep.

Last year, local consumers spent close to $17 million for new mattresses.  A recent survey conducted by Piper Jaffray indicates that many retailers believe  that the category will become even stronger during the last four months of this year.

The reason for the owners' sleep loss is that many customers are bypassing local stores and buying their mattresses on the internet. According to Statista, 37% of buyers are now purchasing from one-of-175 direct-to-consumer sites like Casper or from online retailers like Amazon. 

To keep customers shopping local requires advertising.

Advertising is critical to the success of every Fayetteville small business owner.  One of the most powerful elements of any advertising campaign is how many people it reaches.

Nielsen, the world's largest consumer insights company, found that advertising reach has a more significant effect on sales than branding, recency, and context.

There are many ways a local business owner can advertise. This includes traditional media like Fayetteville radio, local TV, and newspaper. It also includes online advertising options such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pandora.

They type of customer an individual business needs to reach depends on the goods and services the company sells. For instance, a daycare operator might want to reach households with young children. On the other hand, a real estate agent could be looking for consumers in the market to purchase a new home.

The charts below reveal how the different advertising options available to Fayetteville business compare in terms of the ability to reach customers with specific characteristics. This includes age, income, education, employment status, political affiliation, number of children, ethnicity, and planned purchases.

There are two reasons why advertising on Fayetteville radio station is more effective than advertising on TV.

The first reason is reach.  In a study conducted by Nielsen, the number of consumers who are exposed to a commercial contributes profoundly to the number of sales it will create.  This is discussed in depth in the free eBook, "Seven Steps For Advertising Successfully In Fayetteville."

In Fayetteville, among all media, radio offers local advertisers the biggest reach.

The second reason why radio advertising is so powerful has been revealed in a new study Mindshare, an advertising agency that buys media for some of the most successful companies in the world including General Mills, Nestlé, Domino's, IBM, Rolex, and John Deere.

Everybody in Fayetteville used to watch TV, commercials and all. But, as media options proliferate, viewers are fleeing. This is not good news at all for television advertisers.

Last week for instance, according to Nielsen, only 74% of Fayetteville consumers watched broadcast television. To put this in perspective, 93% tuned-in to their favorite radio local radio stations.

Compared to two years ago, according to Nielsen, the C3 rating for CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox have plummeted by 27%, especially among 18-49 viewers.

For most of my lifetime, television advertising was considered the "gold standard" of marketing. For a Fayetteville small business owner craving massive reach, TV used to be the only medium that could deliver. Over the past few years, however, advertising on Fayetteville radio has become the dominant medium for achieving reach as television audiences dramatically erode.

Take last week for example. Almost 290,000 adult consumers tuned-in to their favorite Fayetteville radio stations. This is significantly more than the 181,951 consumers reached by area TV stations.

For the past 40 years, Fayetteville radio has reached more than 90% of all consumers. But, look what has happened to TV's audience.

Yikes. MediaPost reports a 14% decline in live television viewing among 18-49 years this January vs. last January. This applies to both prime time viewing and total day Nielsen C3 ratings. In case you don't know, C3 ratings are a comprehensive measure of the average minute commercial ratings plus three days of time-shifted viewing.

This pattern of double-digit declines began in the middle of last year. July fell 13%, August fell 12%, September fell 14%, October fell 11%, November fell 12%, and December fell 14%.

For those Fayetteville business owners who have been utilizing TV advertising to market their goods and  services, there is a powerful alternative.

Radio listening in Fayetteville, by far, has the most extensive reach among Fayetteville consumers of any advertising medium, according to Nielsen.