Philippines’ Orchestrack automates ad monitoring on radio

Founded in 2010 by two De La Salle graduates, Unyx Sta Ana and Raymond del Rosario, Orchestrack developed algorithms to identify sounds given a few seconds of audio data. This capability is similar to offerings from established players like Soundhound (100m users) and Shazam (20m users), or Google’s recently launched Sound Search service.

Now, Orchestrack has shifted their focus from music and copyright identification to ad monitoring on the air. According to Ms. Sta Ana “What we’re doing now is 24/7 advertising monitoring on radio, TV and streaming media, and offer it as a B2B SaaS to automate spot detection as proof of airing.” In short, they automate the measurement of ad impressions.

Currently advertisers’ pain point is having to confirm ‘proof of airing’ –that paid ads are actually aired over hundreds of radio stations over a contracted period. This monitoring is a time-consuming and manual effort.

In addition, radio stations in faraway provinces may not have enough transmission coverage to reach Metro Manila where most of the advertisers’ monitoring teams are. This makes it nearly impossible to fully make audits of ad placements — unless of course, when these radio stations have online broadcasts on portals such as eRadioportal.com.

This is where Orchestrack comes in to fill the need with their automated solution. Their algorithm identifies the ads aired based on the sounds from the broadcast. It ties together with the radio station on which it aired, and the time the ad was aired. It then saves all these data in their server for analytics and reporting back to their clients.

Using dashboards and in near real time, the advertisers/clients can then quickly see their ad statistics — the number of times that a particular ad for a campaign were actually identified by Orchestrack across the covered TV or radio stations. Other features include self-service, real-time analytics and content management with sample output as shown above.

The quadrant below shows the different market niche served by Orchestrack and similar services. As opposed to Shazam, Soundhound and Google Sound Search that serves the end consumer market by identifying songs submitted by the user, Orchestrack is more enterprise oriented by serving the advertisers’ need for proof of airing. This processes runs on servers without need for end users to initiate:

Orchestrack was one of 8 winners at the recently concluded Hack2Hatch in October 2012. It’s a 3 day entrepreneur bootcamp held at Cebu City with seasoned entrepreneurs, investors and other prolific advisors. Ms Sheila Lirio Marcelo, CEO/Founder of Care.com (shown with the founders in the picture below) mentored them during the said event.

They have generated attention from the Philippine Star, BusinessWorld and SGE’s coverage of Hack2Hatch.

Orchestrack may be able to eventually offer better value by going beyond measuring/monitoring ad impressions. I suggest they also enable click through and ad engagement measurement as well. Click through measures the number of times a user interacts with an ad. While Ad engagement measures the number of times a user shares, likes, tweets about an ad.

With the careful use of gamification (reward points for selected user activities) and social media (with a lot of coding work), it could entice users to interact with the ad by ‘liking’, ‘sharing’ and ‘tweeting’ then record this interaction on its database.

With engagement monitoring, Orchestrack also captures useful data like demographics of the users through their social media profile (age, income level, education perhaps even their location!).

By doing so, Orchestrack provides a more compelling business case to its advertisers/clients. The use of their algorithm to completely automate ad impression monitoring coupled with clickthrough and ad engagement measurements could become a competitive advantage and increase the barriers to entry when it provides all three in one fell swoop.

This of course, brings it on a possible collision course with industry giant Nielsen.

Note: The writer is the owner of eRadioportal.com.

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