Media Monitors / Mediabase

Radio and television sales departments, programmers, record labels and promotion staff, and the advertisers and agencies who want to verify that a schedule ran as ordered. Mediabase is the music-industry half — song airplay detection that drives chart reporting — while Media Monitors is the commercial half, logging advertising occurrences.

To answer one question exactly: what aired, on which station, at what time. From that log come the reports sellers actually use — which advertisers ran the most spots in a market last week, which stations they used, which categories are heating up, and whether a competitor's client has gone dark.

There is no attempt to say what it cost. That restraint is the point. An occurrence log is a fact; a spend estimate is an inference.

Direct signal capture. Receivers monitor stations continuously and match the audio against a reference library using acoustic fingerprinting, the same technique that lets a phone app identify a song. New audio that does not match anything in the library is flagged, identified and added, so a new commercial becomes a tracked entity from its first airing forward.

It is the freshest data in this entire section — same day to next day. Weekly rankers are standard. Because it is a log rather than a model, it does not go stale so much as become history: last quarter's occurrence data is a perfectly accurate record of last quarter.

The one currency issue is library lag. A brand-new creative may sit briefly as unidentified audio before it is classified, so very recent campaign starts can be undercounted for a short window.

Three things it does that nothing else does as cleanly. It proves a schedule ran, which resolves make-good and affidavit disputes without argument. It shows an advertiser's real weight and station mix, so you can see that a prospect is running sixty spots a week across two competitors rather than the light schedule they described. And it catches movement fast — a dark account, a new entrant, a category surging into the market — while there is still time to act.

• Occurrence capture — continuous.
• Standard reports — daily and weekly, including top-advertiser rankers by market.
• Mediabase airplay charts — weekly, on the music industry's chart calendar.

Continuous recording, fingerprint matching against a reference library of known creatives, human review of unmatched audio, then classification by advertiser, brand and category. Reports aggregate occurrences by advertiser, station, daypart and week. Because everything downstream is a count of matched events, the accuracy question is entirely about monitoring coverage and library completeness rather than about modeling assumptions.