Brand research and reputation intelligence firm Ornico has announced that the bungling of adverts broadcast by local television stations had reached a new high and that advertisers could be losing millions from commercials that had not been broadcast or had been broadcast erroneously.
“Our survey shows that the percentage of reported errors in bungled advertising broadcasts reached a new high of 15% in 2008, up 7% from 2007 when the error rate was set at 8%. This means that television stations almost doubled their error rate year on year, and are making more and more mistakes on the non-flighting or erroneous broadcast of television adverts,” said Oresti Patricios, CEO of Ornico. “This represents a huge loss of investment to advertisers, and we expect this trend to continue in 2009. Ornico predicts that error rates will increase sharply because of the huge challenges the SABC is facing and due to the high error ratings we continually see coming through from DStv.”
Patricios adds that between April 2008 and March 2009 the SABC had to compensate companies to the tune R71 million because of mistakes that had been made by the public broadcaster. Compensation was made because of broadcast commercials that had not been run, had been run at the wrong time or had been placed in the wrong television programmes.
“Telmar shows that R13,994,782,500.00 worth of television commercials were placed on local television stations for the period from January to July 2009. The Spotcheque™ verification service that Ornico runs for clients revealed an average error rate of 10.43% for commercials aired across all televisions stations for the period from January to July 2009. When you extrapolate that error percentage to the national advertising revenue picture it means that potentially broadcast advertising worth R1,459,655,814.00 could have not been aired or aired incorrectly. The problem we have in this country is that most media placement agencies don't run an independent verification service, or they use other post campaign tools that have been proved to be faulty in the past because the source of data is not accurate.
“Our data showed that the worst month for mistakes was January 2009 when a 13% mistake margin was recorded for the client advertising tracked by Ornico's Spotcheque™ verification service. On one client where we tracked DStv the error margin reached 84% because so many mistakes were made on the campaign.”
The data released by Ornico represents a sample of some 9,213 adverts flighted on SABC 1, 2, 3 as well as e.tv and M-Net. The DStv channels monitored by Ornico's Spotcheque™ verification service include BBC Lifestyle, BBC Entertainment, KykNet, SuperSport, National Geographic and the M-Net Series channel.
