The effectiveness of an advertising message depends as much on its intrinsic virtues - especially the creative work behind it - , as it does on the context in which it appears. This is why in the print media, the impact of an advertisement can drop by almost 50 % according to the publications Reading Mood 1 - In radio advertising, the ongoing trend is to saturate certain stations while taking little or no account of the programs they broadcast, and to use indifferently general entertainment (Europe 1 RTL, etc.) and music stations (NRJ, Skyrock, etc.) despite the significant differences between the two. Our intention is to show that : - radio has its own listening moods related to both the station and the program being broadcast, and even to the time of broadcast, - and that these listening moods have a very significant influence on the perception of radio messages.
Radio audience measurement is normally undertaken by means of quarter- hour-diary research. This type of measurement provides the ordinary 'ratings' that are being used for media planning as well as for programme evaluation. This data provides no information about the quality of radio listening. This paper presents the methodology and results of a research programme carried out in 1983 in the Netherlands. The research had two separate objectives: to determine the reliability (and validity) of the currently used diary measurement and on the other hand to quantify the quality of radio listening particularly activities carried out during listening and the attention level of the listeners.