What does a long-time dominant player in a market do when it sees a majority of its customers abandoning it to join hands with a new player? It keeps a brave face and moves on.
That is what TAM Media Research, the ‘fall guy’ of the television audience measurement market, is doing as it readies to fight the new kid on the block, Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC). Backed by Indian Broadcasting Foundation, Advertising Agencies Association of India, and Indian Society of Advertisers, BARC is all set to launch its television ratings this month. Deflecting the attention from the big fight, TAM, a joint venture between WPP owned Kantar Media Research and AC Nielsen, is gearing up to measure consumption of video content with the launch of viewership ratings for cross-media platforms.
This will include viewership data for laptop, desktop, tablets, mobiles, etc. As LV Krishnan, CEO of TAM puts it, “television alone is passe” with people spending more time on other screens. Therefore WAM, or web audience measurement, is the next logical move, he says. Krishnan talks about how the audience measurement market is big enough to have multiple players, how TAM is unfazed by the competition and what will be its strategy to tackle the same. Edited excerpts:
With BARC all set to roll out its own television ratings soon, where does it place TAM? Are you worried?
Let’s be clear about one thing. TAM has never been the only service provider of television ratings in this country. Earlier we also had aMap which provided TV ratings. It’s only in the last two years that TAM ended up being the only agency providing measurement data after aMap shut shop in India. We have always said that the market is large enough for multiple players to operate. So why only BARC and TAM, any other company could also come in.
In an expanding market where newer platforms are coming up to watch videos, there are multiple ways to measure viewership. So I don’t see any reasons to worry that there could be a shake-out in the market just because BARC is expected to launch its data soon. It’s a welcome move and we will all co-exist.
But your competitor BARC seems to have the blessings of the government along with the support of the industry. With many broadcasters and media agencies not renewing their subscription with TAM, does it not mean a loss of business?
That doesn’t prevent anyone from coming in and supplying information. One can have multiple blessings but at the end of the day it is the customer who decides to subscribe to a particular ratings system based on her business needs. So, as far as I am concerned, there is nothing called TAM vis-a-vis BARC. It’s TAM,
BARC and probably a third player, and a fourth player as and when they come. From our perspective it is great to have multiple data bases for users.
TAM has faced a lot of criticism for data released for LC1 towns. On the other hand, BARC is expected to cover rural parts of India. Do you feel BARC will end up where TAM is today?
What is the idea of measurement? To give information about our viewing and consumption pattern which is diverse in nature. So viewership data can be diverse for metros where the market is getting more and more fragmented or it could happen in a yet to be explored media market such as the rural parts of India. From a researcher’s perspective, the idea is to provide the information and analytics to broadcasters and media companies. How media companies use the information to create return-on-investment (RoI) for their businesses is up to them completely.
So how do you plan to tackle competition?
Tackling competition is not about enhancing capacity with installation of more people meters. I think it is a very old way of looking at it. One of the discussions with Nielsen has been about using panel data and universal data to deliver a more robust viewership data. This has been already put in practice by Kantar Group and Nielsen across the globe and we will be adopting it soon in India. We believe there are two ways of doing this.
First, we will be soon providing measurement for cross-media viewership in the markets we are present in. We believe that television alone is passé as people spend more time on other screens, watching and consuming various kinds of content. That means TV plus online is the next step for TAM. So TAM to WAM (web audience measurement) is the next move.
This also means that soon we will be moving from using panel data to universal data. Basically, we will be combining data received for consumption of content on various devices such as mobile along with the data mined from the set-top boxes to get much more enriched data at a lower cost. This in turn means that I don’t need to install 50,000 people meter for samples as monitoring of content on web provides us with 5 million samples.
So when TAM goes WAM, exactly what kind of content would you be measuring?
We are exploring video as a key element. Just like television, the online world is also flooded with content. So we would be measuring consumption of programming video content on mobile, computers, laptops, tablets.
While television is linear in nature, the online world in non-linear in nature so we will segregate and measure content by genre. We will have viewership data on the basis of classification of genre of content but not data for specific content. The idea behind the task is to provide the information that viewers are watching a particular genre of content so that the return on money invested is aligned with that particular genre of content.
What about RAM? With phase 3 of radio being announced, what are your plans to bolster the listenership data provided for private FM?
We do have plans to boost the RAM ratings as well. We will have to look at measuring radio listenership by using non-traditional tools. The objective of measuring radio listenership is to provide insights. We are already doing that. In addition to providing listenership data for four cities, we provide sweeps for 10 more cities. So actually we provide listenership data for radio for 14 cities. But sweeps are provided for a limited period. Once the advertising potential grows in these markets, measurement data will be provided regularly for these.
Whether it is the IRS or the TAM, media owners always seem to be dissatisfied with the measurement data. Why?
You need to marry the needs and the deliveries as far as data realised by measurement agencies are concerned. If there is a mismatch between the need and the delivery there will always be a grouse. The problem is that at this point in time we are looking for one tailor-made solution for everybody in media. Rather we need to customise data so that each client benefits from it. We need to look at measurement from a client’s perspective and that’s where we think that universe plus panel data will come into play.
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