Opinion How TV failed to watch itself
The broadcast industry blames audience research agencies now,but the whole system was geared to their convenience....
Around two years ago,a senior executive from a TV audience research organisation told this writer that a leading broadcaster was seeking its help,to build influence in a certain market. This essentially meant installing audience measurement equipment (people meters) in houses identified by the broadcaster. Interestingly,this broadcaster was also a vociferous critic of the prevailing measurement system.
Whether the agency gave in to the broadcasters persistence is not known but the story sums up the pulls and pressures under which the television audience research business has been operating in India.
The governments latest decision to constitute a committee to set up a transparent and effective TRP system in the country is a statement not on the efficacy of television viewership research agencies,but on the broadcast industrys utter failure in resolving one of the many challenges confronting it.
For those who came in late,TRP,or television rating point,is the unit in which television viewership is measured. TRPs denote the percentage of viewers a programme or a channel gets during a particular time period.
It is strange that in the entire debate around television viewership measurement,fingers have only been pointed at the research agencies. Their TRPs have been held responsible for much of the malaise.
The general perception has been that in their blind chase for TRPs,television channels were churning out the kind of programming that will help them attract eyeballs,and in return,advertisers. News channels,which traditionally get lower viewership and hence,lower advertising,have been at the forefront of devising innovative ways of building healthy TRPs. The result has been programming that can hardly be described as responsible and tasteful. It was essentially the aggressive TRP-chase led by news channels that brought the debate of viewership measurement into public domain. Before this,TRP-bashing was essentially the industrys internal time-pass.
The industry had been debating the system for almost a decade. There was a section that always felt that the number of people meters employed by TAM Media Research,the longest-running and most widely accepted research agency,were not enough to assess the varied viewership patterns across our culturally diverse country. Some were not happy with the quality of research. There were also allegations that the process of installing people meters was rigged and some broadcasters knew which areas and houses people meters were installed in.
These allegations,however,came largely from those who werent getting desirable TRPs. Needless to say those getting decent numbers never saw a reason to complain. Indeed,when the two research agencies TAM and Audience Measurement and Analytics recently increased the number of people meters,which resulted in conspicuous shifts in the existing line-up of winners and losers,the traditional support for the research agencies also began dwindling.
This left the agencies in a precarious situation. While the industry did not take any initiative to plug the gaps in the way viewership was measured,there was little the agencies could do to help the situation because their business essentially depended on the industrys cues.
What has conveniently been forgotten in this debate is that research agencies work around the larger agenda set forth by the broadcasters and the advertisers. TAM,for instance,for the longest period ran under the larger umbrella of a joint industry body that had representation from advertisers,media buyers and media organisations. These stakeholders include some of the big daddies of the industry. TAM survives on the fee paid by these stakeholders for the research it generates.
It is implausible that despite their clout they couldnt get TAM to increase its sample size in the past so many years; that while they wanted TAM to churn out numbers from regional and smaller markets,the agency never obliged.
On their own,there is little the research agencies could have done. They are,after all,private enterprises. Research is what they sell and survive on. If there are no buyers for viewership numbers from Kashmir or the Northeast,they have no reason to install people meters in those markets. For them,TRPs are not a subject of academic indulgence but a product that has to have buyers. If broadcasters and advertisers are not interested in funding research from rural markets,there is no way they can do what the rest of the world expects them to. The truth is the vagueness prevailing in the business served the big media shops and advertisers. It was in their interest to let things be. They had several opportunities to straighten the business. The only time they sprang into action was in 2007,when the government for the first time said it would take the matter into its own hands. The joint industry body that governed TAM till then,immediately dissociated itself from the agency and announced the launch of a new body BARC (Broadcast Audience Research Council) but nothing happened after that.
If TRPs today are an abused phenomenon,it is not because of some inherent weakness in their composition but in how the flailing broadcast industry and advertisers misused them in their battle for survival.
archna.shukla@expressindia.com
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