Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: The melodrama over metrics

The media industry fails to get its act together and ends up hurting itself

The blackout has begun. There will be no readership numbers and no television ratings, at least in the foreseeable future in the Rs 83,000 crore Indian media industry.

Going by reports, last week the district court of Gwalior barred Media Research Users Council or MRUC, an industry body, from sharing or using the data from the Indian Readership Survey 2013, after Dainik Bhaskar's appeal. MRUC has already removed the topline findings from its website.

In the same week, the Delhi High Court has given Kantar Group, one of the parents of TAM Media Research, the only TV ratings agency in the country, a two-week grace period to comply with new guidelines from the ministry of information and broadcasting (I&B). These became effective on February 15. It is not clear whether TAM will still manage to meet the new March 1 deadline. If it doesn't, a ratings dark period will begin.

Advertisers, it seems, are headed for a field day bang in the middle of an election year when ad spends are expected to grow 11.6 per cent against 10 per cent last year. Going by numbers released by GroupM, a media agency, of the Rs 36,000-odd crore that advertisers spent on media last year, print and TV accounted for over 80 per cent (these numbers are net of agency commissions). With no metrics to figure out how a show has done or how many people read a newspaper, advertisers will have to use historical data to decide how much to spend on a TV show or a newspaper ad. This benefits the laggard brands that may be losing audiences because there is no measure of their poor performance. And it punishes the ones that are doing well because there is no measure of their rise.

The competitive, private TV broadcast business is more than 22 years old in India. Newspapers have been around for more than 230 years. Why, then, have things come to such a pass?

Some answers: media owners with a short-term vision, a meddlesome government and dysfunctional and pressured industry bodies.

Take ratings. There have been quibbles, fights, even one lawsuit over TAM's small sample size of 9,650 people meters, for measuring ratings in a market with over 153 million TV homes. But broadcasters did not work on the one option available to them - making a robust industry body that could design and own the methodology that decides where almost 80 per cent of the money spent on TV goes. Meanwhile, the I&B ministry's unhealthy curiosity about ratings resulted in three committees. This pushed the industry to kick-start BARC or the Broadcast Audience Research Council last year, six years after putting it into deep freeze. BARC is a joint venture between the Indian Broadcasting Foundation, the Indian Society of Advertisers and the Advertising Agencies Association of India.

By the time BARC got up and running, the damage had been done. On January 16 this year, the I&B ministry issued its rather detailed and restrictive guidelines. These include a 10 per cent limit on any crossholding in other advertising/media/rating agency or in broadcast firms. TAM is owned jointly by the $5.4 billion US-based Nielsen Holdings and Kantar, which is owned by the £10.3 billion UK-based marketing services group WPP. So untangling the shareholding will take more than the 30 days the guidelines stipulate. Even with the grace period, it is not clear if ratings will be back on March 1. The case will come up for hearing again on March 6. Meanwhile, BARC's ratings, officially scheduled for October this year, may be delayed to the beginning of January 2015, say insiders.

Why the I&B ministry had to hurry the guidelines through just when BARC was getting its act together and why it gave TAM so little time to comply with them is up for discussion. What this paper and many in the industry have argued is if the I&B ministry can meddle in television ratings, a private matter between the industry and the agency, what stops it from getting into internet statistics or readership numbers.

However, the ministry has, so far, kept out of the readership drama that is playing out currently. For those who came in late, in the last week of January this year, MRUC released the results of a re-hauled Indian Readership Survey (IRS), done by Nielsen India. It has several upsets across, states, languages, cities and many "anomalies". As a result, newspaper publishers demanded a withdrawal of the data within 24 hours. When MRUC asked them to wait till February 19, several newspapers and magazines chose to withdraw from the IRS. Then Dainik Bhaskar filed a suit that resulted in the stay order. Just like ratings, the future of this metric will now be decided by a court. "We are disappointed that they (Bhaskar) have not taken the arbitration route, however the matter being sub-judice, we would not like to comment," says MRUC chairman Ravi Rao and head of south Asia for Mindshare, a large media agency.

This, again, was an avoidable mess. All it needed was publishers, most of who are MRUC members, to be paying attention when the changes were being made. And it needed an MRUC that was sensitive to needs of its biggest group of members - print.

After almost two years of slow growth, in a potentially good year the media industry could have done without all this melodrama over metrics.

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