Intam Data To Be Suspended For 3 Months

As a part of the integration of the two television rating agencies, AC Nielsen's TAM Media Research and ORG MARG's Intam, the data of Intam will be suspended for three months, from the end of March, till July 1, 2002, when the new currency for the television audience measurement ratings will be launched.

In effect, between April and the unveiling of the new service, TAM data will be the only ratings available for the industry.

As a result, all the broadcasters, advertising agencies as well as the advertisers, who have been subscribing to the Intam data till now, are currently being trained towards using the TAM software, MediaExpress.

TAM India's president L V Krishnan, said: "March 31 is the last date for Intam data. Intam has to be discontinued to felicitate the migration of meters into new markets."

Added Ashok Das, president (media research) ORG-MARG: "TAM and Intam will be pooling their resources to form a new service with re-configured samples of households. To facilitate this, Intam will temporarily suspend supply of data from March 31, until July 2002. During that period, TAM will continue to supply its data."

Till now, both the services have been using different technology. While Intam uses picture matching technology for its peoplemeters, TAM uses a frequency system. The work is currently on to debug the software. It essentially involves software resolutions for which the process is very much on.

"And so, currently, the entire focus is on educating the market about how to make the right use of the database. The market is still not aware of the full capability of the information that the data can deliver and therefore, educating the industry about this becomes imperative," Krishnan added.

Though a decision on the new entity's branding is yet to be taken, sources indicate that in all probabilities, the Joint Industry Body (JIB) committee has decided upon TAM's software, MediaXpress, to be adopted. Interestingly, the issue till was on integrating the services of both TAM and Intam. Said a source: "Since fast speed has been the unique selling proposition of Intam's software, Pointer, the industry has given TAM a deadline till March 31, to sort out the speed issue. And it is believed that TAM is succeeding in the task."

With the launch of single television rating points (TRP) currency, the new entity will also have world's largest sample size of 5,800 peoplemeters. Krishnan said: "It is only two weeks back that we decided upon the sample size. It is going to be one of the largest ever sample sizes in the world, followed by 5,000 plus of Britain and the US each. We are now going to install peoplemeters in as many as 110 urban and semi-rural towns in the country, including Orissa, Bihar, Rajasthan, Kerala, Punjab and Madhya Pradesh other than the existing territories."

In addition to this, TAM has also launched two value added services that could help broadcasters and various advertisers/companies etc in using the database. One is the sales training programme and the other one being a TAM consultancy unit.

A sensitive issue that has been troubling the subscribers about the merger is the cost of the subscription of the single currency. However, Krishnan said: "I don't blame the industry. There is always a fear of monopoly when such a thing happens. But that won't be the case with us. Pricing will be in accordance with JIB and in concurrence with users of these databases."