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India's only TV audience measurement company TAM recently announced its decision to provide monthly ratings as opposed to the customary weekly ratings for select broadcasters. This has divided the industry, with happy broadcasters on one side and miffed advertisers on the other. At the time of going to press, the matter had not been settled one way or the other but here's a representation of all sides of the case
TAM data is just a guiding light
head, media and entertainment programme, Welingkar Institute of Management Development and Research
The industry needs an authentic system to measure viewership patterns across 70 million households. aMap, another ratings company, struggled to bring daily viewership data to use without success.
Providing monthly viewership data will offer a creative breather to broadcasters and production houses that are hassled about changing content to attract eyeballs week- by-week. The weekly tension to be among the top 3 channel positions by increasing GRPs (gross rating points) will ease out.
Advertisers should know that TAM's viewership data - weekly or monthly - is not robust. At best, it is just one of the data sources to understand target groups and behaviour patterns of consumers. It can guide a salt brand, for instance, to have ads on female-driven channels (GECs in particular) and Hindi news channels, watched by distributors and retailers. This way, the brand manager can tick all the check boxes of building brand visibility.
Five years down the line, SEC A consumers will consume content on mobile devices. They will also have the option of zapping the ads. Advertising time per hour has gone down to 12 minutes anyway and youth channels are already surviving on branded content.
TAM data is only a guiding light to help capture trends.
Weekly data is useless
Rohit Gupta
president, Multi Screen Media
The issue of TAM's weekly versus monthly viewership data has been blown out of proportion. I fail to understand how weekly data could be of any use to the advertisers. In the past, there have been no major changes in a channel's ratings over a time period of 10 days.
Top advertisers like HUL and Godrej have made annual deals with various channels in the past. Viewership projections can be made well in advance. It is not fair on the part of the advertisers to say that weekly viewership data is more useful and results in higher return on investment.
At MSM, we are doing our bit by engaging in fruitful conversations with our advertisers. This phase of confusion is temporary. We will soon arrive at a mutually beneficial solution.
Data can continue to be reported weekly
CVL Srinivas
CEO, GroupM South Asia
The move to monthly data from weekly is very regressive. India is one of the very few markets where rating data is still weekly. Most other markets have daily TV ratings. In a world of real-time marketing, when all other data is being made available almost in real time, this change is absurd to say the least.
For the past many years the industry has worked with weekly TV ratings data. The growth of television as a medium has rested on advertising support. TV ratings have played a major role in ensuring some degree of accountability and thereby given a lot of comfort to advertisers to continue investing in the medium. But that is now changing. Advertisers have now started questioning the need to treat TV as a medium for all campaigns.
There is no merit in the argument that moving data to monthly will make it more robust. The same data that is currently being reported with a one-week lag will henceforth have a four-week lag. How will this make it more robust? To make the data more robust or reliable, one can look at options like increasing the sample size, having booster samples for niche audiences or using a weekly rolling method to get statistically significant sample sizes. In all these cases, data can continue to be reported weekly.
This, therefore, brings us to the real reason for the demand to move to monthly ratings. We hear from some quarters that it could be to control the sensational news genre; others say it is aimed to ensure more creative freedom, while some believe that suppressing weekly data will take the attention away from the dreaded 'TRP'. Why not look at moving to daily ratings from weekly in that case? It will be a win-win for all. Look at the way mature markets operate. TV shows are canned in advance (unlimited creative freedom), news channels don't go over the top because of ratings (higher the frequency of ratings, lower will be the ability to keep sensationalism going) and advertisers continue to spend on TV all because ratings are available daily. Unfortunately, we are going the other way. Time to get real (time)!
Advertisers will lose money
Amit Tiwari
director, country head, media, Philips
Monthly viewership data from TAM will spell chaos for advertisers. Only seven broadcasters have opted to move from weekly to monthly reporting of TAM's viewership data. Earlier, with weekly data, we could evaluate all the channels in one plan and make alterations as and when required. An average pan-India media plan covers 35 to 40 channels. One can imagine the confusion that will come into play once we start number crunching for both weekly and monthly data sources for various channels. Advertisers will not be able to generate the loudest bang for their bucks. Ironically, all broadcasters have still not opted for monthly data.
Broadcasters have complained for long that in a country where television viewership is increasing and there is a robust digitisation exercise in place, how can they believe TAM's claim that the TV viewing universe is shrinking?
There is need for a single currency to base advertising decisions on. The CPRP (cost per rating point) model, followed earlier only calculated the percentage share of viewership of the channel and did not account for the growth of the channel and viewers in absolute terms. The cost per thousand model, however, provides absolute figures. Both broadcasters and TAM fail to understand that today advertisers want to understand the content consumption pattern among their target group. Some agencies are doing trend analysis for clients already. It is the need of the hour to marry numbers with content value.
While there are mixed responses to this development, some broadcasters believe that this is a step in the right direction. The question remains whether large advertisers will be happy with this turn of events?
TAM-installed people-meters must capture the demographic difference in smaller pockets and not just the metros. This will happen only when a third party audits the TAM data.
For now, advertisers will need to tread carefully. A balanced approach between buying prime-time and non-prime-time programming will help in justifying returns. Though some sort of consensus between TAM and broadcasters is expected to reach, TAM will need to convince the other stakeholders - agencies and advertisers - too.
