Five leading media firms have questioned the authenticity of audience surveys and ratings by the Kenya Audience Research Firm (KARF).
They are accusing the research firm of falsifying media data and now want new standards for audience research formulated and KARF disbanded.
Further, they are demanding that all results released by the firm in the past year be withdrawn and any further publication or reference to the same stopped.
In their protest letter, the Nation Media Group, Radio Africa Group, Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, Standard Group and Capital Group said KARF has been releasing unreliable and at times falsified media data to the market.
Their respective chief executives, Stephen Gitagama, Patrick Quarcoo, Paul Gilani, Orlando Lyomu and Somoina Kimojino said KARF has failed to fix or address the flaws in their research despite the matter being raised individually and through the Media Owners Association.
Among their complaints is the use of a sample which does not reflect media consumption trends in the country, as the firm does not rebase their sample as required every two years.
The CEOs also complained that the size used for the research is not large enough and is conducted poorly.
They say that initially, 2,800 households were used for the study to represent 48 million Kenyans, but this has been reduced to 1,300.
This, they said, was arrived at without replacing the missing numbers, thus rendering results of the surveys unreliable, unstable and unrepresentative.
“As key players in the industry and having invested millions of dollars in infrastructure and media content, we are extremely concerned that this poor and unreliable research data is very detrimental to our industry,” they said in the signed letter addressed to KARF general manager James Thiong’o.
This they said had affected the needs of their advertising clients as well as their own product development decisions.
They want an all inclusive process of establishing a more reliable and accurate research process and function to be commenced within seven days.
They questioned why KARF picked on a new research partner, TIFA, without informing the interested parties, and that TIFA continues to use the flawed database leading to inaccurate reports.
Danny Mucira of Radio Africa Group said the KARF firm should be suspended as they are running the advertising industry in Kenya on instinct rather than using accurate data, leading to wrong brand decisions.
The Kenya advertising industry was estimated to have spent Sh217 billion in 2018.