Much of this will happen, sources say, at the same operating cost (Rs 100 crore or so) that current ratings agency TAM Media Research estimatedly spends. However, there is an additional capital cost of Rs 90-100 crore that broadcasters are spending in embedding their signals with the watermark. More than 250 channels, constituting roughly 90 per cent of the viewership on Indian television, have already made this investment, claims the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC). A channel that does not invest in watermarking will not be monitored and will, therefore, not show up in the ratings. Very few countries have used watermarking to measure TV viewing. It was rolled out in the US only last year. It is the single biggest difference between the older way of measuring ratings and this one. If it works, India could become a global case study on audience measurement methods and BARC would have fulfilled its objective as an industry body that set out to capture What India Watches, two years ago.
This and more was evident on Monday (September 15) in the ground floor room at the Indian Newspaper Society building in Delhi. Ironically, it was here in a newspaper industry building that BARC is holding the first in a series of interactive sessions across Indian cities on the new television rating system. The system, which will eventually decide the fate of the Rs 17,000 crore of ad money spent on television, was due on October 1. It is now delayed and BARC is chary of committing a date. The bets are it will be out by April 2015. The meters are currently being tested in rural areas, which is where roughly half of India's 160 million TV homes sit.
Shashi Sinha, the chairman of BARC's technical committee, is not even halfway through his presentation before he gets bombarded with questions. He remains unfazed as media buyers and advertisers start grilling him on the nitty-gritty of the new system. He along with BARC CEO Partho Dasgupta and Paritosh Joshi (the architect of the new rating system) answer every question openly. And if they do not know the answer - they say so.
This then is the first big lesson that BARC seems to have learnt from the troubles that the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) has been going through. The Media Research Users Council (MRUC), which owns the IRS, did not put in the same kind of work into involving and educating stakeholders on the new IRS, which came out in January this year. The result was a seven month stand-off, during which court cases happened and the data went through a massive revalidation. Newspaper publishers simply didn't know how to deal with a metric that was based on a new methodology, census and sample. In August this year, four industry bodies finally cleared the new IRS.
This puts BARC, which technically has nothing to do with readership, in a delicate position. Both the new IRS and the proposed TV rating system share several things. One, they use the same establishment survey or the universe from which the sample was chosen. BARC took the survey from MRUC and this has helped cut costs. So it had to wait till the IRS was cleared. This has led to the delay in the ratings data.
Two, they have more or less a common set of advertisers and media buyers.
Three, both have been through massive rehauls simultaneously over the last two years.
The sessions being held in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai this week are a way to gently ease ad agencies, media buyers, advertisers and broadcasters into a basic understanding of what TV ratings in India will look like. Most of the questions that media buyers kept asking revolved around comparing the two ratings - and Sinha and his team kept emphasising they are not at all comparable. This message will take a long time to sink in, if the IRS experience is anything to go by.
They are not comparable for several reasons. The BARC sample is twice the size of TAM's and includes rural India, Jammu & Kashmir and the north-east. The census it is based on is different and so is the demographic classification. BARC will be using the National Consumer Classification System instead of the socio-economic one. The whole process has been broken in to 12 parts and distributed among 26 vendors, all of this orchestrated by BARC, which is a joint venture between the Indian Broadcasting Foundation, Indian Society of Advertisers and Advertising Agencies Association of India. In the earlier system, the designing, roll-out and analysis was done by TAM, under the aegis of a somewhat defunct joint industry body.
Is this then the panacea that the Rs 42,000-crore Indian TV industry is looking for? Maybe not. A larger sample is not going to make everyone happy. Remember how upset broadcasters were when TAM increased its sample last year to include towns with a population of less than one lakh? Many large channels got pushed down the charts. And do niche channels really want to show advertisers how small the niches are in which they operate? As Oscar Wilde said, "When the gods want to punish us they answer our prayers."
Twitter: @vanitakohlik