Broadcast monitoring available to market

“Where we previously operated as the ‘back office' data provider to one particular professional practice, this agreement has now come to an end.”

Afstereo, reputedly the company that invented compliance certification in the South African broadcasting arena, claims 99.9% accurate tracking and reporting capabilities, according to a due diligence exercise completed by independent auditors.

Auditing broadcast accuracy

Compliance with good governance practices requires the auditing of the specific performance of broadcast media owners, which is often a difficult task for media agencies and marketers. Whilst the broadcasters can provide logs, it is extremely difficult for a client to independently identify and prove incidents where the spot was incorrectly broadcast. In many instances, mistakes are often only picked up long after the campaign has run and (in some instances) too late for the broadcaster to rectify the matter through conventional compensation practises.

“This information enables us to review all broadcast events and incidences retrospectively throughout the history of our data and in this way, we compile independent and accurate reports. We compare the confirmed booking schedule against the actual audio and rapidly identify and highlight any exceptions,” adds Khoury. “Our business model is constantly evolving, there is now a need in the market to feedback errors to the media owners within the context of the client's current campaign, allowing the media owner to rectify the error immediately so that the originally planned reach and frequency is achieved.”

“Our tracking and reporting systems are proven, unique and exacting and we are able to report on all broadcast spots (pre-recorded or not) - including those of advertisers who are not yet our clients,” says Khoury. “Our database is a record of actual performance and our records span the period from when we began tracking a particular medium.

Current inaccuracies

“Recently some spokespeople have made comments on the degree of inaccuracy of spot broadcasts and they have placed a value of compensation across the radio and television sectors. Whilst these claims have been somewhat alarmist, we have performed compliance certification on 70 824 radio spots this year and the error rate found on these spots is 4.63%“

“We have recently begun monitoring television and upon checking 11 772 spots we found that there is an error factor of 2%. With television you are more likely to find a ‘position in break' error than a non-flighting,” concludes Khoury.

Afstereo also offers comprehensive market intelligence for the advertising, marketing, media and music industries, which includes competitive data; content monitoring, sponsorship analysis and music reports.