Ratio Magazine :: The Inside Track to East Africa’s Economies - Regional: Start up to Watch: MediaVigil is Taking Media Monitoring Digital

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Regional: Start up to Watch: MediaVigil is Taking Media Monitoring Digital

Monday, 28 July 2008

Rather than rely on time-consuming manual media monitoring, Ugandan start-up MediaVigil relies on IT to generate faster and more accurate media monitoring reports digitally with automated verification. Strong client demand drives the company’s regional expansion.

When Charlie Case was working for Moringa Ogilvy, the Ugandan Ogilvy affiliate agency, they were looking for a reliable and cost-effective solution for monitoring clients’ media. At the time, the only company offering this service did it manually – people listening to the radio and logging the results. This meant that agency had to wait until the end of the month for the reports, manually verify the results against booking orders, and this in turn delayed billing clients – and made the whole process generally slow and clumsy. What Case was looking for was information that was available the next day and where the verification process was automated. Eventually, he left Ogilvy to set up MediaVigil.

Instead of recording adverts the conventional manual way, Mediavigil uses computer technology to capture radio and television adverts as well as any pre-recorded shows or announcements. This enables them to determine with 99% accuracy that it was the client’s that was aired, at exactly what time it ran and for how long: MediaVigil record a minimum of 90 days of the radio and TV audio broadcast stream that can then be accessed via the internet in the form of an MP3 download for manual verification should there be discrepancies. Clients receive daily reports by email so they can instantly check if the media houses have played their adverts the previous day.

The company’s computer systems have built-in tuners that are capable of monitoring 32 Radio/TV stations at once. Antennas are connected to the computers to pick up the signals and the computers then relay the information via the internet in real time to their web servers in Europe. It has taken over two years to develop the software "as we needed a product that was at least 99% accurate" says MediaVigil Managing Director John Montgomery. Loading adverts on the system is also simple – clients merely have to submit MP3 of the advert online to Mediavigil without any modification to the original audio file.

MediaVigil’s services are currently available in Uganda and Kenya, and are being rolled out in Tanzania. An expansion into Zambia, Mozambique and Angola is planned in the near future. Strong demand from large corporates with correspondingly substantial advertising budgets has been a driving factor in the company’s fast growth of regional coverage.

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