Bigger may be better for TV ratings

BARC and TAM's decision to join hands for common ratings based on larger sample will create a level playing field for everyone

The medium-term impact of the pooling of meters by the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) and TAM Media Research will bring more small towns and villages under coverage, reduce carriage fees and make niche broadcasters and regional cable companies happier. "Rural, small towns and premium (programming) categories all come into play (with a larger sample)," says Sudhanshu Vats, group CEO, Viacom18 Media.

In August, BARC joined hands with TAM to set up what is for now called The Meter Company. This 51/49 joint venture will house 22,000 meters from BARC and 12,000 from TAM. The raw data these 34,000 meters generate from India's 160 million TV homes will be offered to BARC. It will fuse and analyse the data before offering it to its subscribers - advertisers, broadcasters and media agencies - who are a part of India's Rs 47,490-crore television business.

Ratings data is critical to taking decisions on advertising and content: which shows are working and which aren't, on the basis of which broadcasters can alter their schedule and storyline, among other things.

With 34,000 meters, BARC will analyse data from roughly 136,000 of the 800 million people that TV reaches. BARC CEO Partho Dasgupta hopes to offer data based on this sample by the second quarter of 2016. This also meets BARC's commitment to ramp up its sample size: 50,000 homes by 2018.

Gains for all

"The smaller companies will now get a level playing field," says Rahul Johri, executive vice-president and general manager, Discovery Networks (South and Southeast Asia). "As a broadcaster in a diverse country we need robustness and stability in data. There was lot of fluctuation in the data because of the small sample size especially for small channels. And that had to be eliminated."

The other big implication he says is that, "the incidence of carriage will go down because you can't buy carriage all over the country now to cover sample homes. How many TRP homes will you buy?"

But a wider coverage also means opportunities. "For smaller firms such as ours, more coverage means more meters in small towns and that makes placement in towns we are in attractive," says Bibhu Prasad Rath, president and CEO of Odisha-based Ortel Communications, a regional cable company.

Ortel's business rests on reaching out directly to its half a million subscribers. If more of its homes are covered, more of them will show up on the data, making Odisha more important for advertisers who go, largely, by ratings data. This improves Ortel's ability to negotiate carriage fees and package rates with broadcasters.

BARC, which became operational earlier in the year, was born in response to quibbles over TAM's sample size. TAM is owned equally by the $6.3 billion US-based Nielsen Holdings and the £11.52 billion UK-based marketing services group WPP. Ever since BARC came into being, there has been awkwardness over the two currencies and the whole question of historical data without which BARC's data cannot be fully relevant.

Prashant Singh, managing director, Nielsen India, says: "For Nielsen and the other stakeholders, it was obvious that two currencies (for TV ratings) were not sustainable. It causes confusion if the numbers differ for the same spot. Two TV measurement systems in any country are difficult to manage and there are only a handful of countries with two systems. Given that, we had to come together."

LV Krishnan, CEO, TAM

"By adding the infrastructure and TAM meters we are increasing the sample and BARC gets the talent pool of TAM for insights on data over the last 15 years," adds LV. Krishnan, CEO, TAM.

Problems ahead

The obvious question this raises is the cost of a larger sample and the fact that if complaints about TAM gave birth to BARC, why use its data now?

The cost implication, say broadcasters, is not significant. Dasgupta maintains that seeding 12,000 meters on its own would mean more capital. This pooling in with TAM simplifies the process. On the differing technology bit, he reckons, "These 12,000 (TAM meters) will be redeployed according to BARC's sampling plan. The raw data comes to BARC and is fused with BARC meter data"

Tony D' Silva, CEO of the media business of the Hinduja group, thinks that this is the time to prepare for what the data for a larger number of TV homes which cover both small-town and rural India will throw up. "One set of broadcasters is very conscious of what this means. Their revenues will now come from advertisers using data from the 34,000 boxes. They are making a lot of effort on pricing, packaging, to make channels available on the boxes. They acknowledge now that the rural consumer will affect advertising decisions."

According to D'Silva, another set of broadcasters is not bothered. "They are only interested in how much money this will bring in - they assume that whatever they are being paid for a customer in Delhi or Mumbai will be paid to them for a customer in a smaller town or in a village," says he.

The changes will take some time to sink in for an industry that has been used to complaining about data instead of using it to make business decisions.