MxMIndia

Category: MEDIA MATRIX

  • Mandatory digitization will hopefully herald an era when choice, not compulsion will decide what is watched, writes Paritosh Joshi

    Paritosh Joshi: Who is Nilam?

    By Paritosh Joshi

    May be the name doesn’t ring a bell when you read this but before the day is over, it is reasonably certain you will know Nilam. For instance, you will know Nilam isn’t a ‘Who’ but a ‘What’. Nilam is the cyclonic storm brewing off the coast of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh that is expected to cross the coast later today.

     

    This morning, I did a quick scan of the major Hindi and English channels to see what they were covering as lead stories on their 6 o’clock bulletins. Barring DD News, either they were on a non-network slot (think Slim Swift, Baba AvtarParmatma, Arthro Go or something similar) or, more ironically, Hurricane Sandy. While it is hard to debate the significance of Sandy given that it has impacted the crucial Eastern Seaboard of the world’s sole superpower and an area of interest to many Indians given that they have friends and relatives residing there, it seems like terrible editing if the terror lurking in our own neighbourhood is ignored in so cavalier a fashion.

     

    Here is why Sandy is, in a ghoulish way, a better story to run than Nilam. Dramatic footage of capsized yachts lying on highways, Manhattan’s Times Square under knee deep water, uprooted trees against the backdrop of the White House and the Capitol: racy stuff compared to the Indian Meteorology Department’s satellite imagery of a grey blotch on a grey background that is Cyclonic Storm Nilam.

     

    Our television news genre has an unfortunate reputation for tabloid and sleaze. Perhaps, news is the only genre where the (older) audience actually remembers the days of Luku Sanyal, Dolly Thakore and Preet K. S. Bedi with a wistful air. When news was delivered in measured tones, not harangue and cacophony. We also remember, with much warmth, the arrival of TWTW*, a path-breaking discontinuity that brought colourful, exciting images from around the world to our generally drab screens. A kinder, gentler era.

     

    After the genre started getting private participation with the advent of satellite TV, a few things changed for the better. For one, the Government, and by implication, the party or coalition in power was no longer seen exclusively through a hagiographic lens and was routinely subject to searching questions and even scathing criticism. For another, stories were better edited with anchoring and on-site reportage alternating on the screen to keep the audience interested. Finally, the typical story duration was shorter and pithier, avoiding prolix rambling that often characterized the Sarkari predecessor’s presentation. Channels were few but were fronted by editors and anchors of distinction and authority.

     

    Unfortunately, the idyllic period was also ephemeral. It wasn’t long before an assortment of unsavoury arrivistes with bags of money and dubious agendas saw the endless opportunities that the genre presented. All it needed was a licence from the Ministry and a transponder on a satellite and you could be well on your way. Threat, extortion, blackmail- it was suddenly possible to turn all manner of villainy into a broadcast business.

     

    The swelling ranks of participants in the news genre revealed a fault line – on one side were the serious players with long-term interests in delivering honest and fair journalism to the consumer, on the other, the cads and bounders with nary a scruple. A slide began that continues, and even accelerates unto this day.

     

    The analog cable plant had serious capacity constraints. A typical headend would offer a 550 MHz capacity with room for barely 50 channels. It was only a matter of time before platform operators discovered the lucrative, carriage fee opportunity. Most news channels were free-to-air and only earned advertising revenue. This could only be secured if the ratings and distribution reports picked them up. Clearly, ratings could only come if basic availability had first been ensured. In droves, then, news channels became willing victims of the menace.

     

    If carriage fee was not a nightmare enough, TRAI’s ever growing laundry list of regulations seemed designed exclusively to injunct broadcasters in ever more onerous ways even as platform operators were at almost complete liberty to run amok. The television news business model was under mortal attack.

     

    What could it do but pull out all stops as it battled back from the corner? The rapid rise of tabloid sensationalism and unglorified sleaze should, in this context, be read as more something to be pitied than censured.

     

    Why is it that we seem to be in a news cul–de–sac while more developed countries produce a wide range of high quality news outlets?

     

    I have, even before this, suggested examining the Ofcom’s ‘Fit and Proper’ test as a model for examining whether a particular entity should be permitted to receive, or continue to bear, a broadcast licence in the news genre. I am not suggesting the establishment of a government regulator for broadcast. A ‘Fit and Proper’ test for India can and should correctly be developed and administered by the News Broadcasters’ Association (NBA) in cooperation with the News Broadcasting Standards Authority (NBSA). The government’s licensing bodies should work with NBA and NBSA in ensuring that every new aspirant is subjected to the test and even legacy broadcasters are subject to a re-evaluation at specified intervals.

     

    In the meanwhile, midnight tonight will herald a very special dawn for India’s television industry- the arrival of mandatory digitisation in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. It is possible that the government may yet develop cold feet at the penultimate moment but that will only postpone, not cancel, the inevitable. This watershed is very good news indeed for the news genre. Once the cable plant goes from deficient to surplus capacity and passive viewers transform into active, demanding consumers, the single biggest cost challenge to the genre will begin to abate. Hopefully, we will enter an era when choice and not compulsion will decide what is watched and the ball will be squarely back in the news producers’ and editors’ courts.

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero

     

  • Broadcasters' abject pusillanimity and advertisers' cussed monomania has made it an awful place where perhaps media agencies can help clear the mess, writes Paritosh Joshi

    Paritosh Joshi: Advertisers their own worst enemies?

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    If you have been keeping track of estimates of the television advertising market over the last several years, using FICCI Frames reports or Media Partners Asia publications or any one of a gaggle of consultant and investment banking firms’ projections, you would cite a year-on-year growth rate of anywhere between 7 and 15% for the last half decade.

     

    If there was an empirical way of verifying this; there isn’t, by the way; the actual numbers would probably fall within this range. Which brings us to a simple question. Is this rate of growth good, bad or terrible? To answer this question, you need another data point. How has the footprint of television grown over this period? When I joined the industry in 2005, conventional wisdom as well as empirical surveys held that India had about 80 million TV homes.

     

    The same sources also suggested that this number was growing by upwards of 7 million homes every year. This growth estimates reconciles fairly well with the latest estimates: over 130 million TV homes now. During this period, the GDP Real’s as distinct from Nominal growth rate , barring the last couple of years, has been in the high single digits. The Nominal growth rate, that doesn’t correct for inflation, has stayed in the teens.

     

    Another way of putting this is as follows. TV households have very nearly doubled their Real incomes and more than doubled Nominal incomes during this period. And the number of TV households has itself grown over 60%. Aggregate all this up and you can reasonably infer that the economic opportunity represented by TV homes, which is after all what advertisers are after, has well nigh tripled during this period. In brief then: TV advertising revenues doubled. Economic opportunity that the advertising chases tripled.

     

    That should settle the question about the quality of the advertising revenue growth rate rather unequivocally- it has been terrible.

     

    And I haven’t come to the bad news yet, but stay with me a moment.

     

    A very large proportion of the revenue growth has come not from better yields or systematic price corrections. It has come from a steady expansion in advertising inventory sold by the broadcasters. Since 2004, the Cable Act places a cap on permissible advertising inventory for a licensed TV channel at 10+2 minutes per programming hour; this to be comprised of 10 minutes for commercial advertising and 2 minutes for channel promotion. In actual fact, and surely you have noticed this every time you watch TV yourself, channels routinely run much more advertising than that. I could name genres that go as far as half an hour for every programmed hour.

     

    However it wasn’t always like this. It got here by the proverbial slippery slope. Starting with generally high compliance with the stipulation at the outset, a given broadcaster might find herself in the situation of having to increase revenue but not muster the courage to secure it by increasing prices. Instead, the broadcaster might say to herself, “hey, let’s slap on a couple of extra 30 seconds spots every hour at the same prices. We will get the revenue we need and no one need be any wiser, after all even the viewer is scarcely likely to notice”. That unpleasant trick called JND – the Just Noticeable Difference – was used repeatedly in its most egregious form, to slice out more and more content time and replace it by a cancerous expansion of commercial time. And the consumer, not being brain dead, was noticing. The broadcaster chickened out of the hard decision and the consequences weren’t pretty.

     

    What happened to the advertiser who refused to pay a modest and fairly earned price increase? His commercial started out in a great place, a 3 BHK you might call it in Mumbai residential terminology but was squeezed, in agonizing progression into a I BHK, a studio, a 1 room chawl, a Dharavikholi and finally a dugout between the platform and the tracks. Eventually, the advertiser’s relentless focus on Efficiency squeezed every last smidgen of Effectiveness out of the commercial, turned it into roadkill. Advertisers scripted their own misery, if somewhat indirectly.

     

    We are in an awful place today. Broadcasters’ abject pusillanimity and advertisers’ cussed monomania has left both in an abyss. Neither appear to have the  gumption or the clarity of thinking that will enable them to emerge from it. So let me thrown down the gauntlet to the third participant in this daisy chain, the media agency. As the intermediary in the transaction, you should most clearly see the trouble we are in. And prescribe the remedy which is so obvious.

     

    Diwali is the season when we clear clutter and cobwebs and give our homes a fresh, cheerful lick of paint. Isn’t it time to do just that to our advertising inventories?

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero

     

     

  • Why do we still persist in thinking that channel brands can be all things to all people?

    Paritosh Joshi: Channel brand or Programme brand?

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    In my early days in broadcasting, I would frequently wonder about this very question, mainly because I saw plenty of media weight put behind individual shows and nearly nothing on the channels that housed them. This may not have been strange by itself but for the suggestion I heard frequently about how shows would perform differently depending upon the ‘platform’ on which they ran, said platform connoting the channel.

     

    The issue came back earlier today when I read about the sale of advertising inventory for Super Bowl XLVII topping $ 225 million. Small explanatory note for those not particularly interested in American sporting traditions. The Super Bowl is the Championship game of the American Football tournament conducted by the NFL, the National Football League. The 47th finals will be played on February 3, 2013 in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, New Orleans, Lousiana. It is the biggest sports event by far of the US sports calendar and attracts major advertising campaign launches including the legendary launch commercial for Apple’s Macintosh computer during Super Bowl XVIII, January 22, 1984. (Stop already. The punters are getting impatient).

     

    Here’s the interesting twist. The event does not belong to a single broadcaster but, since 2008 when Fox carried it, actually rotates between Fox, NBC and CBS in a three-year cycle. XLVI was NBC, XLVII will be CBS and with XLVIII, it will be back at Fox. None of this rotation makes the smallest whit of a difference to Super Bowl.

     

    Cast your mind elsewhere. KBC has run on two major networks. “Friends” and a number of other marquee shows have sometimes been on two networks at the same time albeit with different seasons. Audiences have supported these shows with consistent enthusiasm. There may be a small ‘platform’ effect but in the main, these shows seem to be agnostic to it.

     

    In the meanwhile, another phenomenon is playing out in the world of television, the effective disaggregation of channel content. DVRs are an important spur to this but even sans recorders, consumers also enjoy access to their favourite content online. Piracy it undoubtedly is, but try saying that to a consumer who searches Google for Balika Vadhu Episodes and finds over 4 million results on YouTube.

     

    So how do channels remain brands in the future? Give up the obsession with “General” anything. Brands are about a single-minded commitment to delivering a particular consumer benefit. If you are a comedy channel, well then, deliver comedy. Golf? Cooking? Action? You get the point. These are the kind of brands where the viewer can return to time after time with certainty of finding a particular type of content that she is looking for. Not to mention that these channels don’t need to depend excessively on high cost, big brand shows so long as the content delivers the goods.

     

    The entire evolution of Cable TV in the US, in massive contrast to the legacy Networks: ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox; is in how they have moved to carving up the market along ever tighter benefit propositions. I am particularly fond of a Fox Sports specialized channel, Fuel TV. It does content on only seven extreme sports: Skateboarding, Snowboarding, Wakeboarding, Motocross, Surfing, BMX Biking and UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship). None particularly expensive to source, all with small, committed and substantially overlapping audiences. Just the kind of audience-content combination that can build a tight brand-consumer relationship. And what a wonderful job Fuel TV has done to achieve just that.

     

    So why do we still persist in thinking that channel brands can be all things to all people?

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero

     

  • One of the biggest problems that confounds market researchers is respondent fatigue associated with questionnaire duration. And intervier fatigue too, notes Paritosh Joshi

    Paritosh Joshi: Statistical Doppelganger

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    You know the columnist be facing a serious case of writer’s block if he has to resort to strange German words in the heading itself. Either that or, if you are in a more indulgent mood, maybe you’ll allow for the possibility that there is no other way to express it in the lingua.

     

    The Merriam-Webster defines ‘doppelganger’ as ‘a ghostly counterpart of a living person’. As best as I can tell the only time this word, or idea, made its appearance in popular culture was a 1993 film starring Drew Barrymore as Holly Gooding, “who moves from New York to Los Angeles after being implicated in a murder, pursued by what is apparently her evil twin”. (Source: Wikipedia)

     

    By now, you are used to this columnist’s propensity for stream-of-consciousness meanderings but incredibly enough this is not one of them.

     

    One of the biggest problems that confounds market researchers is respondent fatigue associated with questionnaire duration. It is generally accepted wisdom that questionnaires that run for much longer than 30 minutes almost always suffer from this problem. The respondent is not alone. Interviewers too suffer from fatigue, indeed even more so, considering that they have to keep repeating administration of the same instrument to respondent after respondent. However, the answer cannot always lie in forcing questionnaire length down by truncating further questions after the 30 minute Rubicon has been reached. Syndicated researches of all sorts, readerships studies for example, have a wide scope of discovery. The Indian Readership Survey picks up detailed demographic and socio-economic variables, product and category linkage and other media consumption behaviour in considerable detail in addition to its primary task: determining print readership for several hundred publications in over a dozen languages. The implications for fatigue all around are easily imagined.

     

    When researchers started thinking about this problem, they realized that in any set of responses to an instrument, there were many that bore uncanny similarities to each other. A deeper exploration began to reveal systematic correlations, if not causal relationships between ‘independent’ variables such as basic demographics and ‘dependent’ variables such as consumption of a particular product or media vehicle. By applying this analysis to large data sets, researchers found responses that were near doppelgangers (that word again) of one another.

     

    Contemporary syndicated studies involving large discovery areas (implying long questionnaires) have operationalized this learning.Questionnaires are divided into multiple parts. The first part, that picks up all the classificatory variables, typically demo-, socio- and psychographic variables is administered uniformly to all respondents. The other sections are administered to a subset of the overall sample. For instance, if there were two segments beyond the classificatory unit, the sample would be divided randomly into equal sized halves. After all data are in, the following process is undertaken:

     

    Responses to questions in the Classification segment are administered to both respondents on the basis of which they become a matched pair. Then, Respondent 1 is administered Segment A but skips Segment B while Respondent 2 skips Segment A and is administered Segment B. Finally, Respondent 1 ‘donates’ his responses on Segment A to Respondent 2 who ‘receives’ them and Respondent 2 ‘donates’ his responses on Segment B to Respondent 1 who ‘receives’ them. This donor-recipient process is called Ascription. Missing data is ascribed and fills in the blanks, in a manner of speaking.

     

    Testing of the ascription model involves administering the entire questionnaire to both respondents, then checking the extent to which the actual and ascribed responses vary from one another. A well-selected match would have a high statistical fit. Research agencies around the world have been spending a lot of development time developing such ascription algorithms.

     

    Finally, whole data sets are married to one another using a similar process of respondent level matching and ascription. This kind of large scale merging, technically called Data Fusion, is being employed in various markets to stitch Readership, Listenership, Viewership and Digital Media consumption habits together to deliver a comprehensive view of the manner in which multiple media collide and coalesce in the lives of consumers.

     

    Here in India, we are at the cusp of a lot of exciting development on Ascription and Fusion. Expect this column to tell you more as it happens.

     

     

  • The strength of the Indian SEC is attested to by its utility and durability over the last quarter century, but it may finally be past its 'best by' date. Enter, the NCCS

    Paritosh Joshi: Open Secret: The New Consumer Classification System

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    How many times a day do you use a phrase beginning “SEC A…”? Yes, dozens. Not surprising either. You are in the business of Media & Communications in India and you have spent absolutely years hearing and using SEC.

     

    Socioeconomic Classification has a storied history as a major tool of market research. SEC, as it is universally abbreviated has several advantages over predecessor systems that were typically based on personal or household income. For one, most respondents have a variety of reasons to be economical with the truth in reporting it. The more wealthy will tend to damp it down, the less fortunate inflate it. For another, it has long been known that income by itself has little predictive value in understanding buying and consumption behaviour. Marketers, market researchers and other social scientists, confronted with the inadequacies of income based systems have long sought, and long been eluded by, the perfect system that can explain consumer behaviour. They began to sense promise when they examined the Chief Wage Earner’s (CWE’s) occupation, though. It became clear that people of similar occupation and occupation level had more in common with one another than those that were dissimilar. Systems evolved that were predicated exclusively on CWE’s occupation. The UK, by way of example, evolved the NS-SEC (National Statistics- Socioeconomic Classification). Some countries; India was among the pioneers; went further, developing systems that used two classification variables. Our system used the CWE’s Occupation and Education to determine the socioeconomic class to which a household belonged.

     

    The strength of the Indian SEC is attested to by its utility and durability over the last quarter century, the system having been launched by the Market Research Society of India (MRSI) back in the mid 1980s.

     

    But here’s the bad news. It is finally past its ‘best by’ date. And nobody has told you.

     

    For the last few years, researchers and statisticians have found it ever harder to explain observed behaviour with the SEC. This triggered a joint exercise between the MRSI and the Media Research Users Council (MRUC), the joint-industry body that publishes the Indian Readership Survey to develop a system to replace the SEC. The joint exercise required a lot of very talented analysts and statisticians to test a range of alternative structures using single or multiple classificatory variables to dice the data. One candidate, the winning candidate, paired Education of CWE with Durables Ownership. A pre-specified list of 11 assets is presented to a respondent and all that the system needs is not the specific items ticked but the number of items ticked. Hard is it might appear prima facie to believe this might have some practical application, you end up with a system with very good discriminating ability. The base dataset used to test the validity of all models in reckoning was successive rounds of the Indian Readership Survey. Voila! The New Consumer Classification System (NCCS) was born.

     

    Now here are some cool things about the NCCS.

     

    It is truly Pan India, covering urban and rural audiences. Unlike SEC that was only for urban India.

     

    It discriminates the most premium audiences much more sharply than the predecessor.

     

    It is naturally adaptable. If the current list of 11 durables is no longer able to discriminate in a few years, it will change the list. Indeed, the system is committed to revisiting the list with a pre-specified periodicity.

     

    While the IRS has now started publishing its tables classified both by SEC and NCCS, very few users seem to have actually started looking critically at the NCCS tables. Don’t you want to be the early adapter?

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. His column, Media Matrix, appears on MxMIndia every Thursday

     

     

  • With shockers in the news every second day, the question arises – does media feed the frenzy? Paritosh Joshi takes a closer look

    Paritosh Joshi: Eternal Vigilance – The Price of Freedom

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    Twice last week we have been shaken to the very core of our being as unspeakable horrors unfolded, in a distant commuter town in Connecticut and then right here at home on a bus in Delhi. Anger, indignation, frustration, desire for vigilante leveling of scores outside the criminal justice system, fear, sorrow, resignation… they have all run their predictable, grim course as people vent a deluge of emotions that inevitably arise in response.

     

    There’s a subtext to the discourse that we cannot, even dare not afford to miss. In both instances, the media and their portrayals: of gun culture in one instance, attitudes toward women in the other; are being identified as a factor in amplifying and even glamourising criminal dysfunction. Anguished voices in digital forums are pointing at how a deranged mind of a bright if introverted high school student may have sought out his gruesome final fifteen minutes of media glory in a schoolyard massacre. Or how Indian films and television shows don’t merely condone ‘eve teasing’ but encourage it, thus building a slippery slope from where descent into the most perverted sexual crime is an inevitable consequence.

     

    What compounds the felony, in popular perception, is that the media are seen to be doing this driven solely by the greed for more eyeballs, even if it is at the cost of taste or common decency.

     

    Which brings me to a theme that I have dwelt on before and will continue to belabor, ad nauseam if need be, until things begin to improve. The theme of responsible self-regulation.

     

    Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were among the earliest philosophers to develop the theory of Social Contract. The theory attempts to explain why an individual in human society is prepared to surrender some of her individual liberties to become a part of a governed collective that in return protects her other rights and freedoms. The idea develops quite intuitively, predicated around the permanent vulnerability of an individual outside of the collective to all sorts of perils, natural and man-made, and how joining the covenant instantly trumps a large majority of them. Extending this Social Contract idea, the Media belong to, and are intended to serve, the community in which they operate and to which they must perforce surrender a few of their untrammeled rights in order that they retain most of them. If the Media are seen as engaging in dysfunctional behaviour, they open themselves up to the charge of defying the Social Contract and can be penalized by being docked all their rights and privileges within the democratic polity of the day.

     

    A particular example of Media delinquency is on display when horrors, such as those of recent memory, are squeezed for all they offer by way of ghoulish ‘entertainment’. We all remember the classic but usually entirely rhetorical “Is bhayanak apatti ke baad aap kya mehsoos kar rahe hain?” type question asked to unwary and naive survivors of disasters. Even in the current events cited above, the victim’s and the perp’s relatives have already been sought out and interviewed at a stage when their lives have abruptly upended most cruelly.

     

    I see tokenism too. A few media houses have organized public vigils and little quasi-political rallies where they will have plenty of ‘grief’ on display, complete with slogans, banners and similar appurtenances that need to be worn only so as to demonstrate bnafide intent. This is not going to cut it.

     

    In fact, nothing less than a public mea culpa by the Industry as a whole particular issued by the leading News and Entertainment broadcasters, followed by an unequivocal commitment to introspect on and develop prescriptions for what ails their ethical systems, will suffice in the court of public opinion.

     

    What if no such acknowledgement is forthcoming?

     

    Well then, start preparing yourselves for that most unfortunate and liberty-destroying outcome: a government-appointed and -empowered media watchdog.

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. His column, Media Matrix, appears on MxMIndia on Thursdays

     

  • For Paritosh Joshi, as he looks at the television and print sectors, it was a good year by any standard!

    LookBack 2012: Paritosh Joshi: It was roses, roses all the way

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    Robert Browning wrote many a memorable verse but for me, this line, with which he blasts into ‘The Patriot” is one of his most memorable ever. If this causes you to furiously Google the great poet and discover the lyrical beauty and ferocious power of lines like ”Inscribe all human effort with one word,  Artistry’s haunting curse, the Incomplete!” or ”That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture, The first fine careless rapture!” this columnist should be gratified of a good day’s worth of work.

     

    Where were we? It was roses all the way. Yes, you are entirely right in inferring that this is one more of those ‘looking back, looking forward’ type of pieces that Decembers every year are endemic with. That is where the similarity ends, I hope, for one reason only: most will leave you convinced that the past year was best put behind us and forgotten; such was the mishaps that it was characterized by. This one proposes to go exactly the opposite way and… you shall see.

     

    Television had a great year.

     

    Digitalization got going. If there is one event that marks a huge watershed for every aspect of our television lives, this is it. Long in coming; remember that CAS dates back to exactly a decade earlier; it is ‘der ayad, durustayad’, and having arrived in tandem with addressability, it couldn’t be better. Seeing the back of the era of choked pipes and content scarcity and heralding in broad pipes and contentabundance is going to force change right across the value chain. In the medium term, the next 2-3 years, expect a huge revival in investment interest in the business.

     

    BARC was born. Getting IBF, ISA and AAAI to agree to become equity partners in a joint venture that truly breaks new ground at the global level in the way Joint Industry Bodies (JIBs) work in the audience measurement space was in and of itself a huge win. The leaderships of all three deserve fulsome applause for steering it through crazy twists and turns. Given the huge dependence that so many broadcast businesses have, and will have, on advertising revenue, and given also the huge dependence many consumer businesses have on media buys that bring them audiences that will become consumers, everyone has a huge stake in building a reliable, comprehensive, accountable measurement system. With BARC, this becomes an objective that we can realistically aspire to.

     

    BCCC and NBSA built momentum. Every time our society is faced with issues that trouble us deeply, some attention will always turn to the role the media played in exacerbating or attenuating them. Most times, unfortunately, the media will be vilified for contributing to worsening the issue rather than fixing it. There will be accusations of irresponsibility, tabloid sensationalism, placing commercial interest above public good and so on. More than ever, these are the times when the media should be able to point to regulatory mechanisms that guard the consumer against media misdemeanour. We should all hope that BCCC and NBSA will grow into institutions that enjoy wide acceptance for dispensing fair and transparent self-regulation.

     

    Carriage costs headed south. Now this is an outcome of digitalization for sure, but it warrants a mention by itself. Why? Because an entire genre that plays the very serious role of the fourth estate, the News, was in near terminal jeopardy with the onerousness of this burden. You can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from News broadcasters as they look forward to an era of better economics and the ability to invest back into better news gathering, editing and presentation.

     

    On to Print now.

     

    RSCI began to fire. The Audit Bureau of Circulation and its National Readership Survey (NRS) had already signed truce with the Media Research Users Council and its Indian Readership Survey (IRS) leaving the IRS as the unified study of readership in 2011. However, the progeny, the Readership Studies Council of India really gathered momentum this year. A new vendor for the IRS will take over responsibility from the incumbent very soon and a dramatically transformed survey will land on your desks, with much more insight and depth of understanding than ever before, during the second half of the year to follow.

     

    Consolidation picked up. Smaller publications with strong local franchises are beginning to see the wisdom in hitching their wagons to the big stars. And this is no bad thing. In many instances, the new owners realize the merit in leaving the editorial stances largely alone while aiding in investments where they are sorely necessary, such as newsgathering and technology. The outcomes are beneficial to the acquired and the acquirer. Expect this to remain a theme for quite a while to come.

     

    Digital became plat du jour. Not just the big guns, even small publications in regional languages began to see audiences shifting to consuming their content on digital devices. Everyone is now conscious that 4G and Akash tablet in tandem represent a giant wave, one that they can ride the crest of or get inundated by. While everyone is still struggling to get a handle on the monetization models available to turn digital into cold, hard cash, the inevitability will focus many good minds on cracking this problem, and crack it they will.

     

    So there you have it. A good year by any standard! Since I began with Browning, I am tempted to end with him too, thus.

     

    ”we two

    With life forever old yet new,
    Changed not in kind but in degree,
    The instant made eternity-”

     


  • For a world grown fearful of the digital domain as a hotbed of intellectual piracy, Twitter was a telling contrast

    Paritosh Joshi: In praise of Agora Redux

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    If you have not heard of Dick Costolo yet, here is a prediction. You will. Soon.

     

    We will circle back to Mr Costolo soon enough but let me first offer you a vision of utopia. A place where the humble and the mighty are subject to the exact rules and restrictions. Where anyone can enlist anyone else’s help. Where acts of unalloyed altruism are not exceptions but commonplace. Where creative ideas are amplified and mighty causes ignite from small embers of righteous anger. Where the world, and your school/college/office cohort can all be debating clubs, often simultaneously. Where ideas blossom into enterprise and inequities into social upheavals.

     

    Unless you really have been living under a rock, these last few years, you know what I’m talking about.

     

    Twitter.

     

    I am generally an early adopter of major online services. To wit, HoTMaiL as it was originally christened, launched in July 1996 and my account dates back to October 1996. Facebook opened up to anyone with a valid email address on September 26, 2006 and I was there just a day before it became 10 months old, on July 25, 2007. By those standards, I was a real laggard getting to Twitter, only in its 31st month in January 2009. Having got there, it was not apparent to me what good a pretty basic service that just allowed you to post 140 characters at a time, 140 characters, mind, not 140 words, might do.

     

    While a large number of tweeters used their own names, there were plenty of intriguing, unusual ‘handles’ that others sported. Ashton Kutcher, then famously married to Demi Moore (the whole ‘cougar’ thing) was @aplusk. Amitabh and son went by @SrBachchan and @juniorbachchan respectively. Madhu Menon, the writer chef from Bangalore was @madmanweb. If @chetanbhagat used his own name, an anonymous young satirist sent up the celebrity author under @satanbhagat. Other handles referenced puns, double entendre and wicked wordplay. A great candour seemed to be at work here, with handles offering windows into people’s self-perceptions. A wit quipped, “On Facebook you tell white lies to people who are supposedly your friends. On Twitter, you share your innermost thoughts with absolute strangers”. When you have no fear of being judged, you are free from inhibition.

     

    Soon, a second aspect emerged strongly. Everyone wanted to share something. It was a worldwide ‘Show and Tell’. From Christopher Hitchens’s unapologetic, even militant, atheism and Paul Krugman’s disestablishmentarian views on US budget deficits through urban legends about the nature and history of Adam’s Bridge all the way through gambolling kittens and precocious puppies; even a cursory dip into the Twitter ‘timeline’ was guaranteed to yield at least a shiny bauble and often, a genuinely lustrous gem. A global team of prospectors was mining and panning the unfathomable vastness of the Internet, and giving away the nuggets they extracted.

     

    For a world grown fearful of the digital domain as a hotbed of intellectual piracy, Twitter was a telling contrast. Easy as it might be to filch and republish a 140-character tweet – and there were those who did that to be sure, most regulars would acknowledge another’s authorship by ‘retweeting’ (abbreviated to RT’ing) the original post. If compulsions of length or a desire to annotate resulted in an edit, this would be evident in ‘modified retweet’ or MT. RTs and MTs would occasionally yield a whole torrent of responses resulting in Twitter ‘trends’. Some might just be flighty memes enjoying their few volatile moments in the sun, others would presage a zeitgeist that was just rubbing its eyes and waking up. It made me think of tuning forks used in Physics laboratories. A fork tuned to the same note, even if it was in a different octave, would spontaneously begin to ‘sing’ when a sibling was struck. Twitter was a resonance amplifier.

     

    As adoption grew across geographies, age groups, social classes and cultures, unlikely interactions became commonplace. Conversations that began in the virtual world became so stimulating, the interlocutors frequently sought each other out in the physical too and the tweetup was born. This was one heck of a potent seed. Whole Arab Springs were ushered in by an extreme extrapolation of the idea. Twitter was a cohort catalyst.

     

    I often use the analogy of various forms of cutting instruments when talking about the need for a rich vocabulary in whatever language we use for expressing our thoughts. A limited vocabulary can still convey the intent but in only its broad contours. Such a vocabulary is like a woodcutters axe. It can hack, coarsely, at meaning. A wide vocabulary is like a scalpel or a sculptor’s knife. It can make precise surgical incisions or carve intricate Madonnas and Apsaras from marble blocks. The extreme frugality of 140 characters placed in the hands of the uncouth became a bludgeon, even as it turned into a purifying essence for sophisticated tweeters like @stephenfry and @bhogleharsha.

     

    And so back to Dick Costolo and his speech, which if you hadn’t clicked that link at the top of this piece and heard it already is also available here. Mr. Costolo likens Twitter to the Agora, the centre of the community in ancient Greece. It’s a longish oration but if you thought this article made some sense to you, the hour you spend hearing him will be very rewarding. I promise.

     

    Think of this as a really long tweet. Let’s hear it from you now.

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. His column, Media Matrix, appears on MxMIndia on Thursdays

     

  • Faceless, identity-less statistics – or the very centre of all analytical exercises? It's time to give viewers their due

    Paritosh Joshi: Ratings need reinventing

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    A story on this site published in May 2012, “TAM to cross 10,000 Peoplemeter mark soon”, signalled TAM’s intention to substantially deepen its coverage as India’s television footprint continued relentless growth.

     

    It brought to mind a conversation I had with senior TAM personnel a few years ago where they explained to me the mammoth scale of the data processing task that tracking viewership involved. Here is a simplistic way of looking at it:

    1 2 3 4
    Homes Viewers (Age 4+) per home Average daily time spent (seconds) Unique data points (1. x 2. X 3.)
    10,000 4 14,400 576,000,000

     

    A single day’s dataset has very near 0.6 billion unique data points. Given that ratings are released weekly, the ratings tables that you read are compiled after compiling information from ~4 billion data points.

     

    Let us now throw in a comparison with another medium we are all familiar with: Facebook. In September 2012, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s acquiring its 1 billionth subscriber. Over a half of these are active in a given week and post at a steady rate of 3 updates a day. That’s 1.5 billion updates a day or 10.5 billion a week.

     

    In both cases we are talking about really large numbers. The difference is what happens next.

     

    TAM crunches all the 4 billion data points down to 1 second granularity viewership trends for each channel that it tracks. That gives you, say, 400 channels being tracked. Facebook, taking a radically different view, starts trying to triangulate what are the likes, dislikes, interests and affiliations of each one of 1 billion individuals.

     

    In the TAM view of the world, individuals are faceless, identity-less statistics who vote with their eyes for different channels and shows. In the Facebook view of the world, individuals are the very center of all analytical exercises helping the company offer individually tailored suggestions for everything from whom they should seek out to make friends with through what they ought to be buying.

     

    The difference is telling. The legacy medium places the content at the centre of the analysis plan, the new age one, the consumer. While the first plan crunches a large dataset down to a relatively compact tabulation, the second embraces the concept of ‘Big Data’ where datasets going into the Exabyte order of magnitude (an Exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes) are routine.

     

    Ratings have been around from times when mechanized data processing was in its infancy and the first task before any database manager was reducing and compressing voluminous data into a few large chunks that could then be subjected to analysis. In the specific case of television viewership, an easy was to construct a histogram that plotted the number of viewers against each channel and program. This histogram would then be projected up from the sample to the population to yield an estimate of the percentage of people who watched a particular program: the rating. Since this was the only way in which we had ever seen television viewership being tracked and reported we found nothing odd or inadequate about it. Even today, when digital media enable us to target individuals with very precisely defined characteristics, we still don’t challenge the rather coarse approach that ratings take.

     

    So here is a thought: It is time for television measurement to place the viewer at the centre of the measurement system.

     

    The advent of digitization in India’s television landscape throws up an interesting possibility. If a return path from subscriber to distribution platform is natively available, as it is in digital cable systems or is bolted on using various modes of internet access, as it is in DTH, it becomes possible to know continuously what channel the set top box is tuned to. Techniques like Data Fusion and Ascription (dealt with in a previous column that you can find here) make it possible to marry set top box data with respondent level Peoplemeter data thus magnifying it to large digitally connected populations, within defined levels of statistical error. It is now possible, provided we already have access to cable or DTH operators’ subscriber lists, to develop very good estimates of the viewership behaviours of individual consumers.

     

    In effect, we can tell, within defined levels of error, what an individual in a digital cable or DTH home consumes on television through the day. We now have a view that is viewer centred rather than channel/programme centred. This is where the ‘Big Data’ approach must come in. The massive datasets that are born of the union of Peoplemeter and Set Top Box data need Big Data tools to be managed sensibly. Mining the datasets using these tools can yield an unprecedented level of textured understanding and individually addressable propositions.

     

    And given that digital distribution platforms now have the ability to push messages and suggestions to the viewer, just like online media do, we can use such insights to deliver unique marketing messages, whether for broadcast content or for client brands.

     

    Come on then, BARC, put that viewer at the centre.

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. His column, Media Matrix, appears on MxMIndia, usually on Thursdays

     

  • For the IRS, it's a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't

    Paritosh Joshi: Heads, you win. Tails, I lose

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    The IRS is in a strange situation. If there are sharp changes in any statistic, it is accused of unspecified mischief. If there are no changes, it is pilloried for being inaccurate.

     

    The criticisms usually come in these flavours.

     

    1 Sudden, big moves: Publications launch new editions or prune existing ones on a regular basis. While there is no decision required when an edition disappears, the IRS needs to have a consistent view on incorporating a new edition into the study. Publishers clamour for inclusion no sooner than the edition goes to market. IRS takes the view that as a continuously 4-quarters moving total, it needs a whole year worth of data before the edition can be reported. This is not necessarily bad for the publication either. Basic statistics demand that if the readers actually picked up in fieldwork are below the ‘Normality’ threshold, they cannot be reported. A year’s worth of fieldwork gives every serious participant i adequate time to promote their new offspring so that it shows up in the study. Conversely, editions may sometimes be launched only tactically to preempt a competitor and may disappear once the short term objective is delivered. They certainly don’t belong in the study. Big moves happen when such editions go past the 1-year Rubicon and get reported.

     

    2 Little or no change: This one usually stems from anecdotal observation. A publication may have mounted a particularly visible, or even successful marketing initiative leading to an apparently significant impact on its popularity. The IRS seems unimpressed when the next quarterly round emerges. Easy to explain. Let us assume that a particular saw as much as a 10% improvement in the brand’s performance vis-à-vis the preceding three quarters. If it had on an average, 100 readers in the previous three, it now has 110. This is what the maths would look like:

    (100 x ¾) + (110 x ¼) = 75 + 27.5 = 102.5

    In other words, the ‘smoothing’ effect of the Moving Annual Total reduces the large Δ of 10% to a small 2.5% perturbation in the final outcome.

     

    3 Change in the wrong direction: Related to the previous observation, anecdote suggests an increase/decrease while IRS shows a decrease/increase. This is hard to explain without having some sense of the apparent capriciousness of Probability and Statistics. A simple random sample of adequate size yields convergent estimates of population parameters. However, samples can occasionally produce estimates that may have a wide variance from the underlying population statistics. These samples aren’t wrong. They just happen to be the outliers fully compliant with laws of probability. Such a sample will reveal estimates that are counter-intuitive but that doesn’t make them incorrect. If you never spot a estimate that seems to be out of kilter, you should be more worried about the reliability and/or integrity of a sample-based exercise than if you do, every once in a while.

     

    4 Further analysis produces contradictions and conundrums: My response to this one? Don’t. The IRS reports only those numbers that pass the test of statistical propriety. When you start attempt to dice down whatever has been reported at minimal granularity, you are working with samples that fall below Normality and can no longer be used as consistent and convergent estimates of population behaviour. This, tragically, is practiced almost entirely in the breach by the alarmingly large number of strategists, planners and the like who appear to have no understanding of Statistics.

     

    In exactly three months, we shall have another IRS release and notwithstanding these meek entreaties, the same rotten tomatoes will be hurled at it again.

     

    Comes with the territory.

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. His column, Media Matrix, appears on MxMIndia, usually on Thursdays

     

  • The real game was hardly the burly gladiators of the two teams engaged in organized mayhem. It was what happened during the advertising break

    Paritosh Joshi: 49ers lost the XLVIIth (but I’ll get over it)

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    Since my son moved to beautiful San Francisco, I have thrown my lot in with its sports fans. Back in October ’12, I exulted with them as they celebrated the SF Giants’ World Series victory, grabbing the World Series back after just a year’s gap. When, on February 3, 2013, the San Francisco 49ers squared off against Baltimore Ravens at the Mercedes Benz Superdome, New Orleans, in the finals of the National Football League, the Super Bowl, obviously I was rooting for them. What a game it was, with 49ers conceding a narrow 31-34 victory to the Ravens.

     

    But the real game was hardly the burly gladiators of the two teams engaged in organized mayhem in that Louisiana battleground. It was what happened during the advertising break, (and to be fair, the halftime show featuring Beyonce), that the 47th edition will be remembered for.

     

    Adult American males (TV time spent at nearly 3 hours) and females (2 hours and 30 minutes) are among the world’s most enthusiastic television viewers. While the emergence of Cable brought with it a huge growth in Pay TV, America’s Network operators: ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox; continue to depend primarily on advertising revenue. And the biggest stage for advertising, from sea to shining sea, is the most anticipated, most viewed television show every year; the Super Bowl.

     

    So you already knew all that. But you probably don’t know this: No one knows exactly how many people watched the event that night. It isn’t a state secret or anything, just that they haven’t finished watching it yet.

     

    Yes, the match was settled in the favour of the Ravens that evening itself but that isn’t all there is to measuring viewers, certainly not in the manner agreed between broadcasters and advertisers in the US. Both agree that many viewers postpone viewing from live play out to a later point for a wide variety of reasons impinging upon their viewing convenience and comfort. This has something, but not a whole lot, to do with the popularity of DVR devices. In fact, it goes all the way back to 1976 and the Victor Company of Japan (more popularly recognized by the abbreviated JVC – Japan Victor Corporation). In September ’76, JVC launched the VHS recorder and birthed a global entertainment revolution. A powerful feature that VHS recorders soon offered was their ability to be programmed to record one or more shows when they were unattended. If circumstances contrived to make you miss a show, you could now record it for later viewing. Without really meaning to, the VHS recorder marked a great watershed for television: the era of time-shifted viewing had arrived.

     

    While the initial impact on viewing habits was minuscule, VHS prices came down rapidly and soon a recorder graced every American living room. Even we in India weren’t unaffected. By the late 1970s, our great international trading entrepreneurs of the day – Mr H Mastan Mirza, Mr Sukur N Bakhia, Mr K Lala and Mr V Mudaliar come to mind – introduced India to the VHS revolution. This wide adoption was already starting to measurably impact viewing behaviour by the 1980s.

     

    BARB, the UK’s Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board was set up in 1981. Before its first decade was out, BARB turned its attention to time-shifted viewing and began to wire up VHS recorders in sample homes in addition to measuring on-schedule viewing.

     

    Brings me to an acronym that you would do well to learn now; you are going to be hearing it a lot. VOSDAL. Viewed On Same Day As Live. Self-explanatory really but here is the corollary. Measurement currencies now measure time-shifted viewing for seven days after the original show ran on the FPC (Fixed Point Chart). This is VOSDAL+7, the statistic now widely agreed to be fair measure of the total audience garnered by a show.

     

    Our own viewing behaviour has begun to change at an accelerating pace. DVRs, first introduced to the Indian consumer by Tata Sky in 2010 are now offered by all DTH operators and, with the mandatory rollout of Cable Digitalisation in the top four metropolises, by the major MSOs as well. Adoption cycles will be slow to kick in but prices will keep dropping driving penetration up.

     

    By the way, DVRs are by no means the only technology disrupting the viewing habit. The emergence of second, third and even fourth screens are metamorphosing viewing into a parenthetical “television” experience that shifts it both temporally and spatially.

     

    BARC – the Broadcast Audience Research Council will begin to take its first baby steps soon. While the easiest thing to do would be to continue along the trajectory already established by TAM, it should be clear to stakeholders on all sides that this would be suboptimal and, in the medium term, a significant handicap for the medium.

     

    It is imperative that BARC recognize the need for building a measurement framework that goes well beyond VOSDAL. It will take time to bring consensus around any VOSDAL+ position on the measurement currency but the time to get it started is now.

     

    In the meanwhile, I am betting that Super Bowl XLVII broke last year’s viewership record of 108.7 million viewers. Any takers?

     

    PS: Only when I started researching this piece did I discover that VHS stood for Video Home System. Did you know?

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. His column, Media Matrix, appears on MxMIndia, usually on Thursdays

     

  • With his 'Smart TV' turning smart thanks to internet connectivity, Paritosh Joshi discovers a whole new world of television

    Paritosh Joshi: When is a TV no longer a TV?

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    The arrival of a new mobile device has triggered a dramatic transformation in the TV viewing experience at La Casa Joshi.

     

    What does a mobile device have to do with the television? In these technomorphing times, everything. The mobile device possesses a remarkable capability – it functions as a WiFi router (aka mobile WiFi hotspot). In the process, the wireless internet connectivity it accesses can be shared with up to as many as five other devices. This is what I did. I activated the smart television features of the set. It asked for type of connectivity. I indicated a preference for WiFi. It searched, and promptly found, the mobile device. I entered the passcode that enabled the connection and presto, I was off unlocking a side of my own television’s personality that I had known nothing at all about.

     

    Initial exploration, and I’ve only spent half an hour fooling around with this shiny new toy that popped out of a TV that had graced the wall for a good year before this moment of epiphany, reveals the following:

     

    1. The television has operating software that runs quietly in the background staying on top of whatever is going on. How do I know? Soon as I connected it all up, there was this little prompt – popup box and everything, that indicated that new software was available and sought my permission to download and install it. I agreed and the usual download bar started filling up left to right as it always does (but not on TVs, or at least not until now).

    2. Once the menus are up on the screen, there’s a whole frame with ‘Apps’ and when you navigate to it, you open a drop-down menu with a whole range of choices, “Humour & Comedy”, “Travel & Lifestyle”, “Food & Drinks”, “Action/Adventure”, “Science”, “Technology & Gadgets” and a few others. In each section there are a number of downloadable apps. “Travel” offers you TripAdvisor, “Food” brings up Epicurious, “Technology” decodes as “Engadget” and so on.

    3. In the midst of all this embarras de richesses I found an app called YouTube and in a flash, my TV world changes. For ever.

     

    In that moment, my content choice changed from the hundred-odd channels that the DTH service provides to the endless and continuously expanding Alladin’s Cave of audiovisual treasure that we all know and have come to love. Except, with a huge improvement. Called YouTube Leanback. Suddenly, I wasn’t at bustling content bazar with tantalising goodies tumbling out everywhere the eye turned to a tidy departmental store with everything assigned to tidy aisles, ready to be navigated. Wife searched for Adele and this is what we got on our TV screen. A huge playlist featuring that supremely talented, young British artist kicked in. Rolling in the Deep played. Moved out and made way for Skyfall (the latest Bond caper’s title song, surely you remember?). Then Someone Like You. And it just went on. YouTube was delivering us a ready to run Adele channel.

     

    On a whim, I did a search for Sivaji Ganesan and presto, the fondly remembered court sequence from Parasakthi, and dozens of other equally memorable moments from that great star’s oeuvre were ready to trip the light fantastic. The Beatles. Salil Chowdhury. Amjad Khan. The genie of the endless wishes was raring to please.

     

    A lot of televisions that are moving into consumer homes are now ‘smart’. They are designed to work not as passive devices that receive and render audiovisual streams but as intelligent entertainment appliances waiting to get connected to the internet. And once connected, they really come into their own. While the devices have reached, the connectivity may still be suspect, after all there aren’t that many homes that sport a WiFi network (although it is instructive to turn on a search for networks available in any somewhat genteel residential or office neighbourhood- smart youngsters routinely survive all their torrent streaming by stealing connectivity from their unwary co-residents who haven’t figured out WEP, WPA and such and couldn’t be bothered by little bumps in their data bills). All this is set to change.

     

    The arrival of LTE aka 4G is imminent and in a fell swoop, you go from struggling with 1 Mbps to smooth delivery of 100 Mbps. Now a typical Hollywood film blu-ray DVD runs to about 15 Gb or 15400 Mb. With the monster speeds that LTE should offer, that ought to download in somewhere between three and five minutes. For a full HD, Dolby Surround Audio experience. And out goes the WiFi router and all the paraphernalia around the home. What replaces it is a small dongle that will attach to the HDMI port of the television set. Like this one for instance. Or this one. Available now. For less than Rs. 2000.

     

    What will an LTE-enabled home that has fully unlocked the smart power of its new television do once the dongle is in its dock? Hard to say just yet, but this much is clear. The depth and fury of the change will dwarf all our previous notions of what ‘disruptive technology’ means to the entertainment business.

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. His column, Media Matrix, appears on MxMIndia, usually on Thursdays