BPA urges greater awareness of the role of auditing

That is the conclusion drawn by BPA Worldwide, the global auditor of media, after more than 120 members of the regional newspaper industry attended a panel including its Middle East Business Development Manager, Aspen Aman at a World Association of Newspapers conference in Beirut.

"We found some editorial staff to be quite unaware of audit and how key it is for improving advertising sales,"

explains Aman.

"Their understanding of what a circulation audit was and entails seemed rather sketchy. However, once we started talking about how audits can help quantify their audience in a meaningful way to advertisers, they became more interested in understanding the value and importance that third party standardized industry measurement can bring to their industry. There was something of a blinkered view of the business side of publishing, with the assumption that newspapers just "sell themselves" and that a newspaper is a profitable business as long as they provide "good" content."

With the global economic downturn lapping up on the shores of the Middle East, Aman comments that many advertisers who previously had large advertising budgets for the region must now gain the same or better results from significantly lower financial resources. Increasingly, she confirmed, advertisers in the region are demanding audit data in order to justify their spend in a particular channel or publication; a dramatic change from how advertising was bought and sold in the region even 18 months ago.

"Advertising agencies with Pan-Arab or Pan-Gulf budgets are increasingly aware of the power of audit data as a planning and buying tool," she adds. "More agencies, big and small, are looking for data as a way to deliver good value and positive results to their clients, and editorial staff, especially those working in the covering the media industry as part of their business reporting, need to be acutely aware of this - and act on it."

BPA Worldwide now audits or has applications for membership for more than 100 print titles in the Middle East from media owners in Jordan, Lebanon, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia, as well as the United Arab Emirates. The organisation established an office in Dubai in April 2006 and its Middle East Advisory Board provides input to BPA from local buyers and sellers. The current Board membership of 15 leading industry professionals comprises eight representing advertisers and agencies and seven media owners.