In an effort to nab some advertising share from tv, the Radio Marketing Bureau has released a report which indicates that, even with the lack of visual cues, radio spots are just as memorable as those on tv.

The Radio Advertising Recall study, conducted by ComQuest Research of Toronto and commissioned by the rmb, found that people remember radio advertising at just about the same rate as its pricier tv cousin.

As a percentage of television recall, total recall of radio spots for packaged goods products was 98.6%, while radio recall for the second category – all goods and services – was 83.3% of television’s rate. The comparison was made to television in order to emphasize the value of the lower-priced medium, says Jackie Ferris, senior research methodologist for BBM/ComQuest in Toronto, who headed up the rmb study.

Ferris defines total recall as including unprompted and prompted responses where people could name the brand in question.

Across Toronto, 1,213 people were contacted who had watched either primetime public affairs programming (Sunday, 7-8 pm) or the nightly news (Tuesday, 6-7pm), or who had listened to the morning drive-in show (7:30-8:30 am).

Unprompted, a very low percentage – ‘maybe 1%,’ according to Ferris – can remember any spots. But when the spots are described, radio listeners came up with the brand almost 40% of the time (37.3%) – about the same proportion as tv viewers, who named the brand about 33% of the time. Ferris says the room for error (plus or minus 4%, 19 times out of 20) makes the medium recall rate virtually identical.