Are media audience surveys still worth it?

With a whole lot of users not wanting to participate in such surveys given that their results are so diametrically different, the question becomes important.

Sandip Tarkas,
Media Head,
Reliance ADA Group

"TV, newspapers and magazines have all changed so much, but we research them in much the same way we've been doing in the past".

Many moons ago, much before the age of media, Thomas Robert Malthus, the 19th century English demographer and political economist, had predicted that the world was headed for a disaster as the geometric growth in population (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ...) would outstrip algebraically growing food supply (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...) by the middle of the 19th century. His prediction didn't quite come true for many reasons, but Malthus simply took recent trends and projected them indefinitely into the future, a method that often fails for complex systems.

But it seems we are being revisited by Malthus in the 21st century, especially in media measurement. I look at my own media habits, those of the people around me, and find a dramatic shift in their media consumption habits of, say, 10 or indeed five years ago. The media options and the complexity in media have indeed grown at equivalent of a geometric pace "" and it is my belief that the improvements in our media research such as those represented by surveys like the IRS and NRS are at best incremental. Almost the entire focus of media research seems to be on trying to understand a narrow aspect of the supply side of media. The demand side is not studied with anywhere near the same rigour or frequency.

The first reality in media is that the term "mass media" is becoming a bit of an oxymoron. The first "mass medium" to learn this and adapt to it were magazines. Magazines were left in a shambles by the television explosion. A well developed TV genre almost always sounded the death knell for magazines in that genre. Magazines realised that their role had changed from a horizontal mass medium to a vertical niche medium. With the realisation came the new, improved magazine. The fundamentals of magazine business changed dramatically "" with subsidising of consumer from advertising dropping significantly. Today magazines are thriving but as niche media, and we all love it. However, we still research magazines in roughly the same way we did 50 years ago.

Television itself is learning this lesson every day "" a cursory glance at even the available data would tell you that mass entertainment TV is losing share rather fast to unique content channels. Yet our measurement of TV, such as that done through audience meters of the TAM type, has fundamentally been the same for over 50 years. Of course, we are using technology to get a quicker and more accurate response to essentially the same question. Is it still the most relevant question in the era of "attention economy"?

Let's look at newspapers. Mine has always been a "newspaper hungry" household "" we always had two-three newspapers till about three years ago. Now we get six newspapers a day and that rises to eight on weekends. And we don't spend significantly more time on them. Eight now share the same space so far shared by three. But the readership research is still measuring, perhaps a little more accurately, the same thing. Is that right?

The late NYU professor, Neil Postman, writes in his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, "Statistics create an enormous amount of completely useless information, which compounds the always difficult task of locating that which is useful ... This is more than 'information overload.' It is a matter of 'information trivia.'"

Back in the 19th century, Malthus was proven wrong because of several reasons: Population didn't explode "" and, in fact, steadied in most developed nations, technology transformed food production, the collective human intelligence seemed to succeed in overcoming a seemingly insurmountable problem, and the world survived.

But more importantly, Malthus inspired many others "" among them Darwin and John Maynard Keynes, to take some great insights from his theory to develop their own path-breaking theories. Thus, would it not be right to hope that the Malthusian situation that we find ourselves in will inspire some new and path-breaking work leading to emergence of better insights and not simply creation of more and more "information trivia"?

Chandradeep Mitra,
President, Optimum Media Solutions

"In our search for the Holy Grail, let's not forget how far we've come and the effort put into bringing media research to a level of credibility".

The quest for undisputed, authentic and a single source of media research data is a never-ending saga of blood, sweat and tears! The feeling is that the research agencies have failed to live up to the expectations of advertisers and media planners in the rapidly changing Indian media environment. But let's take a step back and ask a simple question "" why do we need a single source of media data?  Multiple studies within the same domain have given rise to healthy competition between commissioning bodies and/or their respective research agencies. This, in turn, has caused continuous improvement in the research design, sample size, wider geography coverage, greater accountability and timely reporting, to name a few. In short, market forces have kept all the players on their toes and not allowed monopolistic behaviour.  However, the one question that remains unanswered is the cause of variation, sometimes huge, in the numbers thrown up by two different studies. Given the lack of satisfactory explanations for differences between findings of two studies in the same domain, advertisers and media planners can't be blamed for wanting a "single currency".  In our keenness to avoid multiple data source confusion, we are failing to ask a more fundamental question "" if we rely on only one source, what guarantee do we have that this single source will provide reliable authentic data? Maybe the focus should shift from pushing for "single-source" data, to "reliable, authentic" data.  We must first recognise the fact that India is a large complex country going through a period of rapid transition. Within this, the media landscape is even more complicated. And India as a country has always been extremely poor in recording, storing, digitising and retrieving data "" why we're still not sure of the size of the famous Indian middle class!  In print, though we have come a long way in audience measurement from circulation-based measurement to actual head count of the readers, yet the recent controversy about NRS, and its ongoing data mismatch with IRS, is just another example of a problem that doesn't seem to be getting closer to resolution. Like print, TV measurement too is not free from controversy. Research has advanced from diary system to peoplemeters, but questions about small sample size, inadequate representation of geographical and socioeconomic segments, and reliability of ratings, remain unanswered.  Some industry people today believe that its time for different studies and research bodies to be brought on a common platform, and attempt to find common answers to common problems. This is easier said than done, as a number of individual and corporate egos are at play. It may be a good idea to first ensure we have reliable measurement systems, and then design researches to complement and/or augment each other, rather than trying to encourage head-on competition. So perhaps its time that these research bodies forgo their own agendas and come together to offer incremental knowledge/inputs to the marketing/media community.  Another important aspect of media research, which has not been debated fully, is the need for a common research database for all the forms of media, be it print, TV, radio or the Internet, enabling cross media analysis. Perhaps we should move out of the debate over which is authentic currency and leave it to the prudence of the users. The focus now should be to bring in all the research under one umbrella.  While we search for the Holy Grail, let us not lose sight of the fact that we've come a long way. And while resolving our differences, let us not give up on what we already have, as there is a lot of thinking and effort that has gone into getting media research in our country to a certain level of competence and credibility. Negating that would end up hurting all of us!  Views are personal