Credit: Joe Haupt/CC BY-SA 2.0

The Government Communication Service is to begin collecting and analysing data on the airtime achieved by public-information radio broadcasts.

The government provides to commercial and community radio stations across the UK a range of short clips – known as ‘fillers’ – that deliver various public service messages. According to the government, these fillers, which address themes such as public health and road safety, are designed to be “similar to adverts in look and feel”.

They are, however, played at stations’ discretion on a “goodwill” basis.

GCS wishes to collect and analyse data on the amount of airtime achieved by each of the 60 or so public-service fillers that are in circulation at any one time.

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The Cabinet Office-based agency has issued a contract notice seeking a specialist technology supplier that can collect “detailed transmission data” and provide it to GCS via an online portal. The contract notice indicates that individual departments will then be able to subscribe to this data set if they wish to analyse the performance of their messages.

Data should be provided to government in CSV file format and the comms unit expects that, once a new filler has been launched, the analytics provider should be able to begin tracking its airtime performance within 24 hours.

GCS said: “A supplier with the ability to track the authority’s public-information messages across all commercial radio and provide detailed transmission data is required as the authority does not have the resource or expertise to do this in-house. The subscribing departments require data and analytics on the amount of airtime achieved by their radio fillers on UK commercial radio.”

The chosen supplier will be appointed to an initial two-year contract, plus a potential 12-month extension. The deal will be worth an estimated £46,500 to the winning firm.

Bids are open until 2pm on 16 March, with work scheduled to start on 7 April.