Information: FG plans audience measurement confab on broadcast

The Federal Government is to organize an audience measurement conference to provide broadcast industry stakeholders the opportunity to contribute to efforts to establish a scientific audience measurement system for radio television broadcasting in the country.

Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, disclosed this in Lagos yesterday at the Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria (BON) third International Summit on Digital Broadcasting in Nigeria, saying the event would hold October 3, 2017.

“It is imperative that we urgently put in place an industry framework that will ensure that content producers receive their just due for the value of the content they create, as well as provide objective guarantees to the advertising community on their return-on-investment on media placements. This will then have the overall effect of guaranteeing greater spending by the advertisers, who are all seeking to grow their market share.

“This industry framework can only happen if the Ministry of

Information and Culture, which fortunately supervises both the

broadcasting and advertising industries, serves as a catalyst for

putting in place a robust audience measurement system that is in line with global standards and supports the realization of the immense potential that the Nigerian creative and entertainment industry holds,” he said.

He said for the digital switch over from analogue to digital television to be sustainable for signal distributors, channel owners, TV content producers and advertisers, the scientific audience measurement system is critical to articulate the value of the content to Consumers, as well as the value of the audience to advertisers, particularly in the television sector.

He said lack of a scientific audience measurement system resulted in under-investment in the sector, necessary to foster the growth of the industry, as the advertising community continued to rely on subjective factors when making decisions on the content they want, as opposed to how many viewers the Content truly attracts.

He said as a consequence, television platforms were subjected to renting out space on their channels to sustain their businesses and content producers became increasingly over-reliant on sponsorship which, unfortunately, skews the authenticity of their creative output in favor of a few decision makers and not the millions of TV viewers.

“Further, the value of Nigeria’s Broadcasting Advertising Market is

not proportionate with its population when compared to the Top 3

Markets in the Sub-Saharan Africa region. Despite having a population three times more than South Africa, Nigeria’s television advertising revenue in 2016, at $309m, was behind that of South Africa, at $1,301m.

“By 2020, the gap between South Africa and Nigeria is projected to marginally decline to 72 percent. Similarly, in the radio sector, the value of Nigeria’s 2016 advertising revenue of $81m was behind its peers, South Africa and Kenya, both at $343m. Kenya is projected to overtake South Africa in 2017 as the leading radio advertising market,” he said.

Alhaji Mohammed stressed that in both South Africa and Kenya, the value and growth rate of the broadcasting advertising revenue was largely influenced by the availability of a scientific audience measurement system that provided confidence to advertisers in measuring their return-on-investment.

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