To monitor news coverage on radio and television in Latin America you face special challenges. Some cable television broadcasts are inaccessible unless you have a cable subscription. Radio—especially local radio broadcasts—can be difficult to monitor as well unless the monitoring company you hire has personnel in the region. That’s why the monitoring company you select makes a big difference. You need to ask, do they have access to local radio and television and paid cable channels?
While broadcast monitoring today can be done using voice-to-text technology and computers listening for keywords, monitoring done by humans still plays a huge role in this part of the media monitoring industry. With voice-to-text technology, a computer can be trusted to identify when your keyword is mentioned on radio or television. But what about news coverage that doesn’t mention your keyword, but is still important to know about?
That’s where humans come in. A large portion of media monitoring of radio and television is still performed by news analysts who listen to the most important news broadcasts in a given region. Human monitoring can identify broadcast coverage related to your brand where your actual keyword may not be mentioned. This type of monitoring can produce results important to your team that a computer might miss.
When you monitor news coverage of radio and television your results include a video clip of the portion of the news broadcast when your keyword is mentioned—but not the entire show. However, when the monitoring is done by a news analyst instead of a computer, you receive contextual analysis that gives you a bigger picture of what was said.
At Latin Media Monitor we strive to always understand our clients’ strategic objectives and how broadcast media monitoring fits into their decision making. We strive to recommend the right approach: computerized monitoring, or monitoring by humans where appropriate.
