Quiet revolution brings accountability for radio advertisers – Radio Monitoring

Since September last year a quiet revolution has been taking place for advertising agencies and production companies which use radio.

A new monitoring service from Southern Cross Syndication is now able to track radio advertising in near real-time, and provide reports to clients about whether their radio commercials went to air as planned.

Southern Cross Syndication’s Bill Barrington says the service, called Radio Monitoring, is a benefit to both advertisers and radio stations.

“If an error is occurring do you want to find out about it at the end of the advertising campaign, or do you want to find out in time to fix the problem? If it was me I would want to know about a problem straightaway so that I could fix it for the client. That’s what this service does.”

The Radio Monitoring service uses what Barrington describes as a ‘digital watermark’ to place an inaudible code into commercials, which can then be captured and reported.

Clients are provided with reports via daily emails, or within an hour of broadcast by accessing the Radio Monitoring website. The reports can be imported into Ad Scheduling software such as BCC Media Desktop to generate a Mismatch report.

“Advertisers have been asking for more accountability from the radio industry for a long time. It’s not about catching stations out, it’s about providing a tool which advertisers have been screaming for and radio stations can benefit from – that’s the importance of what we’ve done,” says Barrington.

Radio Monitoring’s proprietary encoding, decoding and reporting process “gives extraordinary reliability and reporting speed of broadcast times and placement every hour.” It was developed in-house for Southern Cross by Max Healey.

A patented processing technique is used to embed additional data along with the original audio material when a commercial is distributed through Southern Cross’ Digital Courier satellite service. Clients are charged a fee for the service.

The process is compatible with both analogue and digital systems and
with AM or FM broadcasts, using ‘psychoacoustic masking’ and ‘spread spectrum modulation’ to achieve its goal.

“Psychoacoustic masking ensures the inaudibility of the additional data, hiding the extra signal from the human mind. The spread spectrum modulation provides high robustness against various signal processing attacks by spreading the information over the entire time-frequency plane.

“The watermarking system embeds watermarks into linear audio signals. The basic idea is to hide a broadband data signal below the audio signals´ masking threshold. Listening tests have shown that even for critical signals no noticeable distortion is introduced by the watermark embedding.”

The signal is ‘heard’ by the use of a computer array system in each monitoring centre, then the results are transmitted to a central server which can produce the reports.

“The computers sit there listening to stations in each capital city for an encoded commercial, when they hear it they cross match the code, identify the spot and report the time, date and station back so it is available for secure access viewing by the client,” says Barrington. “There no human beings involved, it is an automated unbiased process.”

What is the response from advertisers?

“They love it,” says Barrington. “We have over 100 clients and there have been no complaints. We know clients have used it to keep their campaigns on track. It fulfills the advertisers’ needs for timeliness and accountability.”

What is the response from stations?

“The stations which are aware of it know how vital this is to the radio industry… Mistakes happen, everyone makes errors. They can see that what this system does is to allow stations that have made an error to fix it.

“There are lots of people in the chain between when a commercial is made and when it gets to air. Someone could input the wrong key number, a spot for the wrong city could be played… it happens. With Radio Monitoring the station knows the client or agency can identify the problem quickly and have it fixed, that’s what matters to them.”

Barrington says the digital watermarking technology was first invented in Germany by the same organisation which invented mp3 encoding. “We took their engine and put a chassis around it, building something that benefits the radio industry and is unique in its approach.”

The process of digital watermarking has been around since 1991 and was originally invented to protect copyright in photographs, from that it was applied to audio and video files. Southern Cross Syndication began developing and testing the technology in May 2002 and went live with it from September last year.

“This gives Digital Courier an end-to-end solution for clients. We can encode the watermark into the spot, distribute it for them, and provide reports of when it went to air.”

“We made a presentation of the system to Commercial Radio Australia last year, but it is not widely understood in radio stations yet. It will be after this – everyone reads radioinfo!”

Commercial Radio Australia is currently using Radio Monitoring to capture airplay for its national branding campaign.

The cost?

Barrington estimates the cost of the Radio Monitoring service at 0.25% of a campaign. “In a $100,000 campaign the extra cost is about $250,” he says. “It’s an automated monitoring service, why should it be expensive, it’s something that allows us to add value for our clients and help stations be accountable.”

Click below for the Radio Monitoring website.