Trp Rating: The Slip Is Showing

The crucial television rating points (TRP) on which the Rs 4,500 crore television advertising market is built may no longer remain a holy cow following the availability of the confidential list of households where the peoplemeters, a measuring instrument, are installed.

The list which includes peoplemeter households in Mumbai, which is available with Business Standard clearly indicate that television serial producers can easily manipulate the ratings if they have access to such a document.

The peoplemeter is an electronic data-capturing device for measuring the member and kinds of people watching TV programmes.

For example, if a producer manages to control 50 households each in Mumbai and Delhi, the TRP of his serial can go up by as much as 6 points which could give him ad spots worth between Rs 70,000 and Rs 2 lakh for a 10 second spot. Anything more can mean real big bucks for the producers.

The ratings are regularly given out by research agencies, ORG- Marg which uses INTAM (Indian National Television Audience Measurement) system and AC Nielsen which uses the TAM (Television Audience Measure- ment) system.

The reason which can lead to manipulation of TRP is because of the small sample size on which the entire rating system works. For example, INTAM has a sample size as low as 4,405 households across the entire country.

With such a low sample size the probability of tampering and manipulating is extremely high considering the fact that each sample household in a city like Mumbai represents almost 8,500 cable and satellite households.

INTAM also has a classification called