They say you can only improve what you can measure. By extension, if there is so much haziness and verbal fisticuffing around television and digital audience and revenue measurement, where is the scope for improvement? More importantly, where does that leave l’auditoire cible?
Take the recently concluded festival of cricket as a starting point. The entire commentary in the media about the viewership and revenue performance of the two broadcasters of the Indian Premier League was based largely on the claims and counter-claims of the two involved. If one went by their own assessments and pronouncements, both Jio and Disney Star—the digital and TV broadcaster respectively—broke the most records this season.
Disney Star said a whopping 505 million viewers tuned in to watch the live broadcast of the matches on television and the number of total viewers—including viewership for all the other coverages related to the matches and highlights—touched 535 million. It also said IPL had become the first cricket tournament to log over half a billion viewers for the live feed on TV.
For its part, JioCinema said a record 449 million viewers tuned in to the OTT platform to catch their IPL coverage. It also said the adoption of connected TV saw a rapid step up this year, with more than 126 million viewers logging in to JioCinema for IPL. The platform also claimed to have set another record with 32 million viewers tuning in to watch just the final match. And in the end, both claimed—albeit via unofficial sources—that they had raked in upwards of Rs 2,000 crore in advertising revenue alone.
If the numbers shared by the two protagonists are anything to go by, TV is anything but dead and cricket is the king of sports in India.
So far so good. The only problem is that while much of the data for linear TV that was placed before media came from the Broadcast Audience Research Council India (BARC), one doesn’t know where to look even while not disputing the veracity of their claims if one were to corroborate the digital viewership or the revenue data quoted by the two. In fact, analysis by Elara Capital has said that there was at least a 30% decline in total IPL ad revenue this year. While TV plus digital last year was close to Rs 4,300 crore, the total revenue this year was around Rs 3,300 crore.
This is the current linear TV-versus-digital clash in a nutshell. It began with OTT platforms taking a hammer to appointment viewing and now it’s a full-blown war of words.
But for the advertiser, it’s not going to be about crowning a winner, it’s about leveraging them in tandem. A big chunk of marketers still measures them in isolation. OTT is the exclusive preserve of the digital team, linear is purchased and measured by the “traditional media” manager, and the tension between the two manifests itself in measurement.
Here’s the thing. Linear TV measurement has been in a state of flux over the past several years. Marketers might agree that the medium continues to be one of the top-performing media channels, but measurement has been a subject of endless debates, despite the RPD STBs and all. The issue looks knottier when you compare TV’s measurement tools to those available to digital. If nothing else, digital is easy to track—measurement solutions can come via third-party cookies or universal IDs or even omnichannel targeting. Once you have the privacy thing figured out—considering 50% of internet users already say privacy is a concern—experts say there is technology available to bridge audience identities.
That said, penetration data shows it won’t be a cakewalk for connected devices or OTT so far. Industry reports of EY-FICCI and Affle show that smartphone penetration in India is close to 460 million, which is just half that of television in the country. Data cost is a major factor driving consumption and when there is no cricket, the interest to watch sporting events on OTT might flag.
The other question one needs an answer to is, is the linear viewer watching her programme of choice exclusively on TV at a predetermined hour day after day? Is appointment viewing still a thing? The problem is that household panel data for linear is limiting. It only measures what is running on TV, not—as a recent report on Adweek put it— “who is sitting on the couch watching”. Identifying the household member who is sitting on the couch at a certain hour and watching a show or a piece of brand message is still the biggest puzzle for both programmers and marketers to solve. Even in the best of times, an advertiser will rely on extrapolations. That is, if there is an IPL match on and a 25-year-old male is in the house, it will be assumed that it is this person that is on the couch and watching.
Maybe it’s time we kept the noise levels down and tried answering some hard questions. Yes, the marketers’ definition of television has changed, but does that mean the way consumers engage with it also has? Instead of coming up with new-fangled solutions to measure buys, is it time to look at a single solution that can measure, more or less accurately, cross-channel media consumption patterns and find ways to connect them to marketing impact? When the focus shifts on these, advertisers will start seeing better outcomes.