What is the point of monitoring media?
Media and advertising agencies could write entire volumes on this question. But, to put it in short: media monitoring is useful for knowing
- what is happening in the world,
- where a certain piece of information appears (news, statement, etc.),
- when it appears, how many times and to what extent.
From a press agency’s point of view, the last two are very valuable information, as it shows their clients how many impacts they have had on a given campaign, which is usually a very important KPI. Actually, media monitoring is nothing new, because it has been done for decades, although until not that long ago, the work consisted of making actual clippings from newspapers and magazines to show the client the appearance of their product or news. And there was a lot of watching TV, to note where something related to a campaign had been mentioned.
Today, in an age where absolutely everything leaves a digital footprint on the Internet, in the form of a blog, YouTube video or social network post, the job of media monitoring has become both simpler and more complicated. It’s simpler because information can be searched and accessed at any time, and appearances can be found with ease. The problem lies in the number of information sources that currently exist. Trying to build a comprehensive picture of the impact of a news item or advertisement is a daunting task because of the sheer amount of channels that exist.
And this is where automated media monitoring, based on artificial intelligence (AI), comes in. It would be completely unfeasible for a person to try to keep up with everything that is mentioned around certain keywords. And this is why monitoring systems were designed and developed by companies like ISID offering video monitoring software and radio and television monitoring software, and they are analysing all public information channels on a 24/7 basis and allow you to set alarms (or even more complex tasks) every time they discover the mention of some keyword.
“Media monitoring is an extremely valuable source of information for gaining insights into economic, social and political aspects of current affairs.”
Who may need media monitoring?
In addition to the obvious application that we have already mentioned for media or advertising agencies, to justify their existence and their good work, today there are many more sectors that may be interested in media monitoring:
- Commercial use. This use overlaps a lot with that of advertising agencies, since commercial, marketing or sales departments are the ones that usually hire agencies to advertise a product or service and monitor the success of the different actions. But it is also important to monitor the competition.
- Business/Finance. Although, a priori, it may seem that it is the same as the previous use, at a purely business level it is very important to be up to date with international news (especially in large companies), since relevant news can have an impact on the company, its finances, investments, etc. This is especially important at the macroeconomic level.
- Science. The scientific uses of media monitoring are virtually unlimited. From psychology and sociology to statistics, there is everything. But even branches such as physics, medicine or similar can be interested in monitoring what is being published, to keep up to date or to find synergies.
- Politics. Obviously, knowing the sentiment of the population with respect to a new law that has been enacted is of great value. As is knowing what a political opponent is doing or saying, to counter or mitigate possible attacks. Or, more passively, to know where statements just made by a member of the government have appeared, at what length they have been included, and whether they have been trimmed to cause bias.
- Security. Finally, in the field of traditional security, the monitoring of the usual communication channels (TV, Radio, Internet) can be of great value in certain investigations, especially if social networks and messaging systems (at least those that are not encrypted) are included.
- Intelligence. Even at a country scale, intelligence agencies can find a lot of valuable information in the combination of information from different channels, to assess possible potential dangers, irregular movements of people, etc.
Crawling as a source of information
Like Google, many media monitoring systems use spiders or bots to obtain information from selected media (text, audio or video publications). And, in a 24/7 loop, these spiders crawl the web and all other media to collect the requested information and perform permanent analysis, allowing the evolution of the different messages to be assessed over time.
Continue learning about this topic check out part II of this article from ISID.