Instead of sharing the blame for failing to activate an alternative body that could have fixed the faulty TRP business in the country, as recommended by a government panel in 2011, both broadcasters and advertisers joined hands on Wednesday to question and blame TAM India for messing up the television audience measurement system in the country.
This comes a day after news broadcaster NDTV sued global research giant Nielsen in a US court claiming damages of $1.3 billion for gross negligence, false representation and wrongdoings in the television audience measurement data in India. When contacted, TAM India executive said since the matter was subjudice, the company would not comment.
Broadcasters, advertisers and media agencies also joined hands and called for an immediate revamp of the current system of determining the Television Rating Points (TRP) system, which directly impacts the flow of over R10,000 crore of advertisers? money spent on television.
However, most stakeholders did not want to take the blame for failing to operationalising BARC or broadcast audience research council, a joint industry body of broadcasters and advertisers formed last year to fix TRP system. Instead, TAM India?s operation (or the lack of it) came under the spot light. TAM is a subsidiary of Nielsen which has been providing TRP and related data to both broadcasters and advertisers for over a decade.
?TAM?s sample size is a concern for broadcasters, especially for niche channels whose base is small. There?s no consistency in ratings and the segmentation of markets (SEC A, B, C) is not proper,? said Rohit Gupta, president (ad sales) of Multi Screen Media (MSM), which owns Sony Entertainment Television.
Sports broadcasters went a step further citing severe discrepancies in TAM ratings and when compared with network?s own distribution data. Nimbus-owned Neo Sports is one such channel. When asked, Prasanna Krishnan, chief operating officer of Neo Sports said: ?Our ground-level distribution data often doesn?t match with TAM ratings.?
On its part, the media buying and planning agencies also blamed TAM for not measuring the rural market. ?TAM measures only urban viewership and that can be prohibitive for advertisers who want to reach rural markets,? said Nikhil Rangnekar, joint CEO of Spatial Access, a media audit company.
Another senior executive in a Gurgaon-based media agency said TAM always promised to scale up the people-meters but never actually implemented it. ?It managed to get away with inadequate data despite the need for it, specially in the last 12-18 months,? the executive said.
Those contacted by FE said TAM?s sample size is ?too small? and ?does not? correctly reflect TRP viewership in a fragmented television market like India, a fact already established by the Amit Mitra-appointed panel which called for a complete revamp of TRP business last year.
Even the NDTV lawsuit talks about inadequate people-meters churning up faulty viewership data. People-meter is a device which captures the viewing pattern of select households which then forms the basis of TRP, gross rating points (GRP), viewership and market share among others. The Mitra panel recommended scaling up the people-meters from 8,000 to 30,000 by 2015 at an estimated cost of R660 crore which would be raised from within the stakeholders who need the data.
When contacted, Justin Sargent, managing director of Nielsen India said, ?As a matter of strict company policy, we don?t comment on lawsuits. The company will maintain silence as long as the matter is subjudice.?
As reported by FE, the government has decided to step in the matter. Sources said, the broadcast regulator may soon be called upon for its views in the matter. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has already submitted its recommendations in 2008 following which the Amit Mitra-panel was formed in 2010.
