Media accountability underway
The Executive Secretary, Media Independent Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MIPAN), Mr. Eki Adzufeh, has advocated for the deployment of auto-log in all the broadcasting stations in the country.
Adzufeh stressed that media practitioners would be able to account for the adverts that they deployed in the media, stressing that when such technology is fully deployed in most media houses in Nigeria, it would go a long way in ameliorating the crisis amongst the media agencies, the clients and the media monitoring agencies.
He pointed out that most private stations were already using it but added that government owned stations were yet to deploy such broadcast infrastructure.
According to him, with an auto-log infrastructure in place, it automatically logs into the broadcasting stations’ system, noting that as they produce, it automatically records the adverts and the time it was deployed simultaneously.
The MIPAN Executive Secretary lamented that one of the greatest challenges that practitioners face in the industry was due to conflicting reports often issued by the media monitoring agencies as regard the adverts that were deployed in the media.
In his words: “We have come to discover that some of these monitoring agencies have not lived up to expectation. It is either they have not done their homework very well or they don’t have enough infrastructures or people who are not paid well, so you will see someone who is supposed to be checking the media sleeping or he is not there or what if they take the light.”
“All these thing add up to thwart the monitoring agencies sometimes at doing their job to the best as expected but because they want to look good before the client; some of them cook their reports and of course the client will now say, you as the media agency, you collected this money and you did not deliver but the media agency will now go back to the client to say wait, because you have to get the media owner to also speak, the media owner will bring a proof and then you will discover that, that report that the monitor gave you was wrong.”
“Sometimes, these variations are checked two or three times, without knowing who to believe. we are saying that now, there are some very sophisticated media owners now who have embedded an infrastructure called auto-log into their system so that as they are broadcasting, the adverts and every other thing are going on simultaneously and at the end of the day, the adverts and the time it ran would all be documented by the auto-log infrastructure”
Adzufeh noted that having the auto-log in place was the best option at the moment because it would bring accountability to the media profession, noting that with the broadcast infrastructure in place, the media monitoring agencies could be at the verge of losing their jobs.
“The media owners for instance radio stations, you will buy the auto-log and couple it into your broadcasting equipment so that as you are transmitting, it is recording automatically and it will just print with the computer at the end of the day to say these are the adverts and these are the times they ran whether it ran completely or it didn’t run completely, it will show.”
“The truth of the matter is that we don’t even need all these monitoring agencies. If the media owners are doing their work as experts because each time they bring the auto-log report, at the end of the day the monitoring people will lose their jobs.” he stressed.
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