Firms Can’t Account for N13.4bn Advertising Expenditure – Report

• Firms Can’t Account for N13.4bn Advertising Expenditure

More than 40 per cent of media advertising expenditure by companies in the country last year were unaccounted for, according to a report by a marketing and advertising publication.

An estimated N13.4bn of media advertising that would have been paid for, according to Marketing Edge, was either misplaced (i.e. advert not carried as planned and ordered) or unaccounted for (i.e. advert not monitored to be sure it was carried in the first place).

It said the situation was compounded by allegations that some media monitoring service providers might have been conniving with some radio and television stations as well as media agency employees to issue questionable, even fraudulent media compliance reports over the years.

The report alleged that a radio station in the North claimed 100 per cent compliance in January 2017 but was proved wrong after checks by a media monitoring service provider.

In another situation, one of the three media monitoring service providers had given a zero compliance on a media campaign that none of the advert spots earlier booked by an advertiser was carried at all or on time as planned and ordered.

It stated that findings further revealed that the dispute involving a media agency, a broadcast station and a media monitoring service agency was finally resolved in February through the hiring of another media monitoring service provider who used its audio-playback facility.

“This, no doubt, confirmed earlier fears of a tripartite conspiracy in the Nigerian media market,” the report added.

Some broadcast stations have been alleged to be in the habit of doctoring advert logs, according to Marketing Edge.

It said, “Our intelligence team discovered the case of an Ibadan-based TV station, which, after a lot of back and forth with an advertiser, had a dispute resolved only after the station’s logs for that particular month were backed with air-side-audio files from a media monitoring service provider.”