Findings from a series of studies conducted by Cumulus Media/Westwood One’s Audio Active Group measuring the impact of multiple tax preparation services’ AM/FM radio campaigns this year show that heavy AM/FM listeners are more likely to use these services and have stronger brand familiarity vs. heavy TV viewers. Radio ads also have a significant effect on site traffic for these brands.
“Several years of market studies reveal that AM/FM radio listeners are bigger users of tax preparation services and are far more engaged with the tax prep category,” Cumulus Media/Westwood One Audio Active Group Chief Insights Officer Pierre Bouvard says in Westwood One’s weekly blog. “Despite this, tax prep ad spend is significantly over-invested on TV and massively under-invested on AM/FM radio.”
Indeed, according to ad spend figures from Vivvix for the period from December 2023 to April 2024, the heart of tax prep season, TV accounted for 48% of the category’s media spend, 12 times that of AM/FM radio’s 4%. Yet heavy AM/FM listeners are 67% more aware of tax prep brands than heavy TV viewers, based on a MARU/Matchbox survey conducted last April among 1,000 adults 18 and over.
“One would think with the significant TV spend, tax preparation brands would have massive familiarity among heavy TV viewers, [but] that is not the case,” Bouvard says. “One theory is that TV viewers are far less interested and far less engaged with the tax prep category. No matter how many TV ads are rained down on viewers, the TV ads don’t resonate as well as the AM/FM radio ads among the AM/FM radio audience.”
The MARU study also shows that compared to the U.S. average, heavy AM/FM radio listeners are not only 26% more likely to pay more than $100 to prepare their income tax, but also 35% more likely to consider using all of the major tax prep services.
Additional research from LeadsRx measuring the impact of all AM/FM radio ads from all vendors captured by Media Monitors shows that AM/FM radio generated a 35% increase in web traffic for one tax preparation brand, with web traffic for that brand up 59% vs. 2023’s tax season.
From a radio format standpoint, comparing share of web interactions to share of Nielsen AM/FM radio ad impressions, sports, Spanish, news/talk, top 40 and alternative outperform when it comes to driving site traffic for the tax prep brand.
The blog also cites a study from location-based attribution researcher Motionworks, which found that location visitation significantly increased in DMA markets where the AM/FM radio campaign for the brand was heaviest. “Markets with heavy AM/FM radio campaign investment received significantly greater location visitation activity for the tax preparation brand than markets with light media weight,” Bouvard says. “In January [2024], markets with the heaviest AM/FM radio weight saw 245% greater location visits compared to DMA markets with the lightest AM/FM radio weight.”
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