How PR Firms Monitor Broadcast Media with TV Eyes CEO David Ives

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In an always-on world, public relations firms with the ability to monitor broadcast media help clients stay current on how their brand, industry, and competitors are being covered in broadcast and cable television.

This gives you a huge advantage when it comes to defending your brand and managing your reputation, particularly in the event of crisis or news media backlash of some kind.

As part of the research I did for my Guide to News Media Monitoring, I spoke to TVEyes CEO David Ives about his platform and the state of the broadcast media monitoring industry.

This post summarizes our discussion about: 

• Leveraging artificial intelligence to monitor conversations on multiple different channels
• The difference between predicting viral marketing vs. tracking viral content
• Features and options you should consider when shopping for broadcast media monitoring services   

What are broadcast media monitoring services

Broadcast media monitoring services record and archive local and national news programs — on broadcast television, cable television, and radio —  to ensure that you have quick access to any news clips you may be interested in to protect the reputation of your company, brand, product or service. Many services monitor podcasts too.

News Media Monitoring vs. Social Media Monitoring vs. Broadcast Media Monitoring Services

If you want to monitor your Brand’s reputation, you should be listening to coverage in the news media, what people are saying on social media, and what’s being broadcast on television and cable news media.

That’s a lot of ground to cover.  You need to monitor news, social and broadcasts because all three channels impact your reputation.

The news media monitoring industry is crowded with providers that claim to do all three, but the truth is each one of them comes from one of those three categories and typically resells the other two channels through some sort of partnership agreement.

So the major players in the news media monitoring category resell their feeds to the social media monitoring and the broadcast media monitoring services. The broadcast media monitoring services resale their feeds to the social media monitoring and the news media monitoring service providers.

Nearly all social media monitoring and news media monitoring service providers white label and resell the TVEyes service when it comes to monitoring video.

What they don’t tell you though is that none of the partners that offer broadcast media monitoring coverage through reseller agreements with TVEyes allow for downloading of broadcast coverage. 

So while you can view them inside their platform, the downloading of video clips is only available to clients with a TVEyes subscription.

How the TVEyes Media Monitoring Suite came to be

As one of the first broadcast media monitoring services, TVEyes maintains a searchable index of the stories broadcast and cable news media going back 90 days. They’re able to do this in a matter of minutes, delivering their clients access to the news media coverage so they can better manage corporate and brand reputation.

Growing from a bootstrapped business in the early 2000s to a B2B industry leader that’s currently offering broadcast media monitoring services in 16 countries and around 12 different languages, TVEyes has not just witnessed the digital transformation, it has effectively monitored and created an archive of the conversations we’ve been having online.

Today, David’s team is using AI to crawl the web, find relevant content for clients, and generate scannable text transcripts of broadcast news, radio shows, popular videos, and podcasts spoken word programming:

• Broadcast and cable news media monitoring is possible due to close-captioning. They can strip that captioning from the broadcast to create a searchable transcript.
• Podcast monitoring uses AI automatic ad insertion to know when a particular keyword is spoken and jump to the right place in a given episode. For many advertisers and podcasters, those placements are automatically done by podcast tech, not the podcasters themselves.

“Our goal is to follow eyeballs and ears. Wherever there is a meaningful conversation happening, we are monitoring that discussion. Our use of AI is on the backend, not the query. Our dictionaries update themselves automatically, doing speech-to-text transcription.” 

David Ives

When will AI replace Boolean queries?

It’s still too early for AI to replace Boolean queries, but TVEyes is using AI in their speech-to-text software to improve transcript accuracy through probabilistic analysis, which determines what word was likely to have been spoken by analyzing the surrounding words. This works well until you encounter a keyword that is not in the dictionary, such as new brands and elected officials.

When considering the criterion for which media to monitor, David said they are following the people. Right now, for example, podcasts are exploding in popularity. They allow hosts a lot of flexibility when it comes to creating something the consumer wants (as opposed to news or radio) and, as a result, audiences are generally very targeted.

This niched-down pool of potential leads can become a golden opportunity for brands to reach their exact target market through content creative.

Can broadcast media monitoring support viral content marketing?

As with other marketing tech, media monitoring tools are designed to help companies collect meaningful insights, spot patterns and analyze the results..

While it can help you evaluate the success of a campaign and identify what has gone viral, media monitoring services are not content creation tools or indicate how to create viral content.

“What makes something go viral? Well, we don’t really know, but we DO recognize when something has reached viral status. Then, we create and index the conversation. Our goal is to quickly identify what has taken off and make it searchable at the spoken word level.”

There still needs to be someone in the company putting the pieces together to create insights and take action. 

Keeping apprised of your media coverage is also valuable from an online reputation management standpoint. Because it serves as source material for Google’s Knowledge Graph and can justify a Wikipedia entry as well.

Media monitoring services can be used to spot media bias

Understanding what the world is saying about your brand is an invaluable asset to have in your marketing arsenal.

TVEyes helps brands do this in a number of ways, including:

• Requesting that specific podcasts or channels be monitored. 
• Creating a standing watch list for keywords or phrases you care about that will give you an email alert within seconds of that keyword being spoken.
• Using their powerful ad hoc search tool to filter by format.

But not all media monitoring services are created equal.

There are questions you need to ask as you look for traditional and social media monitoring services. It’s also important to bear in mind that qualifying data, fact-checking material, and editing is not a part of media monitoring. 

Rather, monitoring tools are there to provide a 24/7 comprehensive index of content on the internet. 

In my Guide to Media Monitoring, I reviewed the top 10 News, Social, and broadcast monitoring platforms. I created a features comparison chart so you can see which platforms have what features. And I included my own personal reviews of each media Monitoring Service, as well as user ratings so you can see how customers respond after using them for an extended period of time.

Download the guide and start protecting your reputation through media monitoring today.