Indian newspaper and magazine publishers are up in arms against the findings of the new Indian Readership Survey (IRS). At the time of going to press they had threatened to withdraw from the Media Research Users Council (MRUC), which owns and commissions the IRS. This seems strange.
The IRS is a metric used to buy and sell advertising in the Rs 22,400 crore Indian print media industry. The MRUC was set up in 1994 with members drawn from all categories of users - advertisers, media agencies, publishers, broadcasters and other media owners. It was born to counter the National Readership Survey (NRS), which was supported by large newspaper groups and to make the metric more sensitive to the needs of all users. Till 2006, almost a decade after the first IRS came out, advertisers used both. Then, NRS was phased out because of data anomalies. Soon the complaints about IRS, its methodology and its ability to capture the heterogeneity of the market started rising. Some of them were valid. For instance, magazines always suffered because the bias was towards newspapers with their large numbers.
With a view to tackling these issues, in 2009, the MRUC joined hands with the Audit Bureau of Circulations. In 2011, it created the Readership Studies Council of India or RSCI. In 2012, it gave Nielsen India the mandate to do the IRS, instead of Hansa Research.
The data, which came out last week, are the result of over two years of deliberations and work put in by the MRUC. The changes in methodology, sampling and data collection and analysis have been discussed with all members of the MRUC and RSCI. The first time we wrote about the new methodology was in May 2012, when it had been finalised. The assumption was that everyone who is a member of the MRUC knew what was happening, had understood it and approved it. The current board of governors includes very senior people from five major print firms. The technical committee, which worked on the rehaul of the IRS, has 20 members, six of them from print firms (including one from this paper).
The rehaul and its details have been public for a long time. Why react now after the data are out?
The data do have anomalies, some glaring ones. For instance, Business Line, a Chennai head-quartered paper has a higher readership in Manipur than in Chennai. You could argue about why these happened - implementation flaws, faulty methodology design, bad sampling among dozens of reasons. Or, it could just be statistical error. The anomalies being pointed out refer to a few reporting areas while the survey covered 2,35,000 people across 90 reporting areas. Considering the size of the survey, there are very few anomalies, says one person familiar with the survey.
Eventually the MRUC will tackle these. But it also needs to tackle the two possible factors that led to this mess in the first place.
One, publisher members may not admit it but they were not paying attention when the methodology was being overhauled. One large publisher said, "We need to be more clued in."
Two, any new methodology was bound to throw up data that would not be acceptable to brands that lose or get shuffled around. MRUC could have worked at making the transition from an old methodology to a new one smoother. The new IRS cannot be compared to historical data, says a note accompanying the findings. But could there have been some way of aligning? An industry cannot junk 17 years of one currency and understand, adapt, use and accept the anomalies of a completely new one. Especially one as wedded to the old ways, as print is. The shock of this new world where data were collected through computerised, double screen wielding interviewers, fused using different samples and was largely untouched by hand was too much. That is what publishers are reacting to.
To be fair, newspapers lose advertising money when there are large shifts in their data. Notice that advertisers and media agencies have not protested at all. It is just a metric for them.
What happens next? It would be silly of publishers to withdraw from an industry body of which they are part. Most advertisers would not find readership numbers coming only from publishers credible. Globally, industry bodies are the best way to tackle audience measurement and MRUC is an industry body. Besides, the new IRS data are also on a software and geo-tagged. Publishers who are MRUC members can go back to the interviews, see what happened and ensure that it gets fixed.
This IRS came after a year's gap. The next one that would be acceptable to everyone could take longer. But there is no reason to junk it.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
