Live broadcasting has always been a vital part of our work and one of the strengths of live-linked TV interviews is that there can be no debate about where and when coverage appears. Everybody knows what happened.
But when we produce news edits for broadcasters and news agencies – often for the same stories we have covered live – one of the biggest challenges is to find out exactly when and where they been broadcast. Traditional broadcast monitoring can be expensive and, in our experience, somewhat hit-and-miss, so over recent years we have been pleased to adopt a system that produces impressive and cost-effective results by checking a unique digital ‘fingerprint’ from our footage against the recorded output of almost 2,000 broadcast channels world-wide.
At a recent charity golf tournament in Sardinia we produced a series of live satellite-linked TV interviews on Sky and BBC World followed by a TV news edit. When the event organizers wanted to know what coverage had been generated, with the help of our monitoring agency we were able to report a healthy score of 91 separate news stories on 24 different stations in 15 regions around the world, well above average for this type of event. For the last three years we have used the same system to monitor coverage from projects including our distribution of a major New Year’s Eve fireworks show which has generated separate news stories measured in thousands globally.
The tool isn’t right for every project, but it is a highly effective way of measuring coverage and gauging the return on investment of time, energy and money. We are always happy to discuss the costs and benefits of monitoring for any project without imposing any obligation to use it.