Imagine the gall and arrogance of a person doing this to you: without our permission, a major market radio station recently took it upon themselves to add a music bed to our agency-created spot for one of our client’s voice-only spots. The station production person thought the spot should have music, worried that it might cause the PPM (portable people meter that measures listening in major markets) not to pick up the station’s signal for encoding purposes, which would hurt their ratings. Not only is the premise that a voice-only spot would hurt their ratings, imagine someone deciding for you, without your permission, that a change is going to be made to one of your commercials, assuming that they know better than you, what is best for you. Our advice is to be sure to get a copy of any spot that you send to a station, on a spot-random basis, to ensure that the spot they are playing on the air or streaming has not modified. While this is a rare occurrence, you can never be 100% certain that your creative has not been modified in some way once it is entered into their production system. ‘Trust but verify’ as we mentioned in an earlier blog: Trust But Verify.