Audience Research Data-The Nigerian Experience

I am an employee of government's federal radio in Nigeria. I have been exposed to several seminal discourse on the role of audience data in media planning and buying. At the beginning, I was sceptical and suspicious of research data being churned out by research agencies about the media in Nigeria. This perception melted away when I met a long term friend and one of the resource persons at an APCON organised workshop in person of Tolu Ogunkoya, a media independent and chief executive officer of Media Reach. In his words " old boy the industry today believes so much in this stuff, you have no choice but to key in............or you get kicked out" It was a day of reckoning for me when the realities of the situation began to take a logical form in my mind. Awaken from my inadvertent professional slumber, I started preaching the gospel of media research and the need for my station to subscribe to the services of one of the credible media research agencies in the country. Today, after much ado about the issue, my station is now in a collaboration with Media Planning Services, a research agency based in Lagos. The question I want to ask is: are media research data being properly harnessed by media {especially electronic} organisations? If I may answer the question, my answer will be NO, relying on my interaction with some of my colleagues both within and outside my station. I need comments and suggestions to this topic. But meanwhile, reaseach has gone to an unprcedented level in countries like the United States of America. For further insight you can log on to www.arbitron.com Thanks for staying on till now.