No context or reason for asking this question. Here’s Dr Bhaskar Das in the November 10 edition of Das ka Dum. Read on…
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Q. Despite no third-party readership data for a while, the newspaper industry has been getting ads. If advertisers and media agencies are cool with it (or not very uncool with it), why do an IRS at all
A. There is no denying the fact that audience data is important in deciding on the media investment. But post Covid, manual field data collection was a challenge. Now that the threat of Covid infection has reduced considerably, the concerned body must be evaluating various options.
Having said that, newspapers have an advantage as their business survives on response delivered to the advertisers. Though ROI calculation, before the media selection might be a challenge, but empirical evidence confirms the investment. Advertisers have their internal metric to evaluate every outlay. Secondly, (again an Indian context), in most of the newspaper markets, there are one or two dominant market leader/s. Being a passive medium with an active audience (reading-wise) , the pecking order of leadership plays a key role in both consumer immersion in the content consumption and, accordingly, the response quantity and quality get impacted positively. This experience leads to future inclusion of the publication in various campaigns. Due to this unique nature of the sector, newspapers can continue without a formal data regime, though it’s not an ideal situation from the media planning and buying context.