What do you Consume for Breakfast?

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Fact. A little before breakfast, 00.01am to be exact, on Thursday 25 October RAJAR released the Quarter 3 2012 data to the market. Back to breakfast in a minute. In general radio terms, it was a particularly interesting and exciting period in the UK and probably an atypical one in terms of how people consumed media. Most notably the overwhelming success of the London Olympics and Paralympics played havoc with every day routine, perhaps pushing people to media and devices they may not favour in the usual run of things.

Radio listening seems to have held up pretty well under the pressure of such televisual feasts as Olympic Super Saturday. Nationally, all listening remained at 89% - 46.6 million people – listening during an average week, this is unchanged from last time around. In London too, while listening levels were a little lower at 87% of the population, it’s a figure unchanged from the previous period, the number of hours recorded are up on last quarter – 212.4million from 204.7m. So there was still room radio listening amongst all the other streaming, downloading and recording that was certainly going on to keep abreast of the Games.

The big, radio specific news of Quarter 3 2012 has to be the final RAJAR release for Radio 1s breakfast host, Chris Moyles. At the helm for 8 years and 8 months, this far outstrips the average 3 years and 4 months experienced by most Radio 1 DJs. While numbers may arguably have been starting to slide until late, Moyles consistently achieved 7 to 7.5 million listeners, sometimes even more, this really is quite impressive.

Earlier in October, Ipsos MediaCT hosted a Breakfast Radio Seminar. Speakers from Ipsos, the BBC and Bauer’s radio division discussed and presented on the importance of using the breakfast show as the front door to the rest of the day. We also heard of the various moods and motivations that drive people when first waking up and tailoring broadcasts to suit the target audience – the full report from the specially designed research can be found in our latest thought piece 'Breakfast Radio: The most important media of the day?'.

RAJAR in Quarter 3 tells us that 36.2 million adults listen to a breakfast show* during an average week day. Other sources give us how the vast majority of kitchen radios are tuned to the same station and how over half of us have the radio on in the background. This goes to explain the importance of the breakfast show – we choose our station then leave it running while going about our morning activities – a nice relaxing breakfast or running around trying to get the kids presentable enough to go to school. Whatever it is you do in the morning, nearly 70% of us do it with the radio on.

As a follow up to the Breakfast Seminar we’ve created this infographic outlining some of the key stats and numbers relating to Breakfast listening.

Other facts and figures relating to the latest RAJAR release can be picked up from their website however what this particular release seems to demonstrate is that while there may be short term distractions, gold medal rushes or near freakishly impressive feats of strength or speed are great to watch, long term we still listen to the radio. The starting point for the majority of the population is with a radio breakfast show, the most important broadcast of the day.

*6-9am, Monday-Friday