Mumbai: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, or Trai, which also oversees the broadcast sector, recently recommended that there should be no cross-holding between television programme rating agencies and broadcasters, advertisers and advertising agencies.
It was to address the controversy over ownership patterns of audience measurement companies that the Broadcast Audience Research Council, or Barc, was formed in 2007.
Barc is expected to commission independent research in television audience measurement next year, and has representations from three industry bodies—the Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA), Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) and the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF).
Television viewership patterns in India are measured and analysed by two companies: TAM Media Research Pvt. Ltd, a joint venture between ACNielsen and IMRB International, which is owned by Kantar Group, a WPP Group Plc. company, and Audience Measurement and Analytics Ltd.
As competition intensifies in the broadcast industry, Mint asked four leading names in the advertising and communications space whether advertising agencies, clients and broadcasters should be allowed to have a stake in TV audience measurement companies. Edited excerpts:
Basically, there are two models for TV audience measurement.
The first approach is that a research agency runs it as a commercial venture. A research agency can be entrepreneurial. In a market where TV audience measurement is absent or primitive, a research agency may see an opportunity and make the investments necessary to get a decent measurement system going.
Arvind Sharma, Chairman and managing director, Leo Burnett India
The downside of this approach is that once its audience measurement becomes the market currency, it is not entirely unnatural for the research agency to behave as a monopoly. The research agency’s key motivation can be maximization of profits. This can result in limited or no improvement in research design and samples, and in subscribers continuing to pay high prices long after the research agency’s capital costs have been recovered.
That said, it is also possible for an agency to be guided by enlightened self-interest—to keep its users reasonably satisfied. There are a number of markets where TV audience measurement continues to be managed by individual research agencies. Examples of such markets, if my knowledge is up to date, are the US, Canada and Japan.
In the second approach, the users collectively take control of TV audience measurement. They take a view on the appropriate technology to be used and investments required, raise money from the users and direct (that is, give directions for changes) and fund improvements in the research methodology and design over time. They take responsibility so that the kinks that appear from time to time in any sample-based estimation are sorted out. They also ensure that the price charged for measurement is fair.