media monitoring

The challenge

How to check the public image of your organization in the media? What is being said related to your brands? And most important – how to evaluate whether it is good or bad, enough or not sufficient, whether it improved over time or not?

The solution

The tricky question about media monitoring is not what media you analyze. More important is what you do with the data you get. But in order to know what data to seek, you should know how to decode it.    

When evaluating the media monitoring proposals I consider the industry characteristics – for automotive business highly influential are internet and print media, mainly national magazines and the most influential newspapers’ automotive pages. Radio and TV appearances are not totally excluded of the traditional automotive monitoring. Specialized internet sites are also of interest considering the pro-automotive culture in the country.

The monitoring system I used for the media evaluation was divided into the following groups of brands: Mercedes-Benz Passenger Cars, Mercedes-Benz Vans and Trucks, Setra and Mercedes-Benz Buses and Coaches, Jeep, Mitsubishi, Balkan Star. For every group there was an overview of the main activities for the period and evaluation of the communication highlights (usually quarterly based).

Based on the daily clippings I compared the media presence using a special points system. It consisted of diverse criteria such as valuation of the specific media image and distribution, the size and position of the article, the surrounding, the picture (if any), incl. whether it was a black-and-white one or in color. An important feature – distinguished art of the system – is the tonality evaluation of the articles.

This system allowed me both to have an overview over the presence of all automotive brands in the country comparing them directly and to be able to track performance variation for every group over time. Additionally the advertising value was measured – accumulated for the brands and separated for each highlight I defined.

To the business units I provided an analysis of the media monitoring results depending on the business targets, planning and resources allocation.

The outcome

The media monitoring system I used provided daily overview of the automotive articles, brands presence evaluation, measurement of the brands groups and highlights, analysis of the media presence relevance. This system allowed brand and topics comparison both between automotive competitors and for each segment over time.

The accurate media presence evaluation allowed every business unit to react quickly, according the planning, and to manage communication trends depending on the business strategy of the group of companies.