BackBARC promises new services, buyers look for stability
The Broadcast India study will offer a revised estimate of the TV viewing universe and throw light on the changing habits of viewers
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When the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India, a joint industry body formed for measuring television viewership, rolled out its first set of TV ratings on 29 April last year, it was described by some as a watershed moment for the broadcasting industry as the data was said to be more representative, objective and transparent.
As it celebrates its first anniversary and enters the second year of operations, the organization—comprising broadcasters, advertising agencies and advertisers—is promising new products and services.
Partho Dasgupta, chief executive officer of BARC India, says the focus in the coming year is on expansion of meter homes, digital measurement roll-out and the unveiling of Broadcast India, the new universe estimation study that it had commissioned research firm Nielsen to conduct.
“Apart from this, we are also working on a new offering called VAL (Video Asset Link)-ID. This will help uniform labelling of advertising across digital platforms and linear TV," he says.
In other words, the measurement of ad spots will now be automated, and therefore more accurate, as opposed to the manual tracking that was the practice at BARC.
At Meterology Data Pvt. Ltd, the joint meter management company that BARC had formed with TAM Media Research Pvt. Ltd, the work on integrating the teams of the two firms has started. The meters that operated under TAM (the erstwhile audience measurement system put in place by information and insights firm Nielsen and Kantar Media, a WPP company) are being uninstalled and will be redeployed at BARC panel homes. Once the redeployment is complete, data from 34,000 panel homes will begin flowing into BARC India servers.
Currently, BARC has 22,000 installed meters. As per its last universe estimates, there are 153.5 million TV households across urban and rural India, and BARC tracks and measures viewership habits of all these households.
More important, BARC will unveil the Broadcast India study soon. Nielsen, which did the fieldwork for the study, covered 300,000 households. BARC claims this is the largest such study ever. Currently BARC universe estimates are based on the Indian Readership Survey 2013 data, which is almost three years old.
According to Dasgupta, the new study will provide the industry with more recent understanding on count and composition of television households in the country. “This study will also form the base of our next round of panel expansion in television," he says.
The Broadcast India study will offer a revised estimate of the TV viewing universe and throw light on the changing habits of viewers. With new data at hand, advertisers and broadcasters may have to revise their own business excel sheets.
To be sure, when it started out, BARC was tracking 277 channels. In the last one year, 460 channels have adopted the watermarking technology. Dasgupta claims this accounts for more than 97% of Indian TV viewership as well as advertising revenue. If you include the language feeds, BARC is actually tracking about 520-plus channels in the country. “Agencies deciding on 90% of advertising revenue are also part of BARC India system. We are seeing increasing interest for our data from advertisers as well," he says.
Interestingly, media specialists at advertising agencies have mixed feelings towards BARC data. Neel Kamal Sharma, chief operating officer (buying) at Madison Media, says BARC has made a difference to the life of a media planner in terms of allowing him to plan for towns with a population of under 100,000 as well as for rural India. “It is one of the most useful (pieces of) data to many advertisers who used qualitative inferences in the past while planning for rural," he says.
Harsha Joshi, executive vice-president, group trading at Dentsu Aegis Network, agrees that BARC data is robust as it captures urban and rural viewership.
However, both Sharma and Joshi as well as several other media buyers say they are still waiting for BARC viewership data to settle down. In some markets, the reported numbers are not consistent and prone to big swings, they say. The chief operating officer of a media agency who declined to be named says that BARC should have had a longer overlap with TAM and the transition phase should have been smoother. “The nuances are all gone. It is a flatter data," the person said.
Buyers add that there have been frequent changes at BARC itself (it moved from offering household to individual data, added rural viewership and is now deploying TAM meters), which keep causing variation in data.
Due to the frequent changes, it has not been possible to read viewership trends for a longer period of time, says Sharma, and adds, “For any marketer, reading trends from the past is one of the most important aspects of data to take any decision on their brands..."
On expectations from BARC in its second year, Joshi remarks: “Hoping to see data and software stabilize first—this is the critical piece."
Shuchi Bansal is Mint’s media, marketing and advertising editor. Ordinary Post will look at pressing issues related to all three. Or just fun stuff.
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