By Indrani Sen
Media Audience Research in India for the traditional media has definitely not moved forward over since the onset of Covid-19. The Indian National Readership Survey was last published for Q4 2019, MRUC’s contract with Nielsen ended along with it. In November 2019, a request for proposal (RFP) for conducting IRS was made by MRUC from various market research agencies for continuing with the study, but it appears now that no progress has been made in that direction over the last two years.
In July 2020, MRUC had officially suspended IRS 2020 and had decided to return the money paid by the shareholders for that purpose. There has already been a two-year gap in the print audience research, which is likely to be extended further as MRUC has not yet selected a research agency for conducting IRS, let alone finding a solution for conducting the fieldwork in the new normal. I came across a news item on October 31, 2021 which indicated that MRUC is starting from scratch by inviting fresh proposals (https://www.allaboutnewspapers.com/mruc-inviting-research-partners-to-conduct-indian-readership-survey-irs/).
BARC, which has been continuing during the pandemic with its regular TV measurement research through peoplemeters, also took a few backward steps with criticisms about its methodology and the silent death of its Digital Media Measurement Programme, Ekam, before it had a chance to be tested before implementation. In 2016, BARC announced with a lot of fanfare its intention of measuring digital media viewership and after a few months in 2017 tied up with Nielsen for two years in order to develop a neutral and independent cross-platform measurement solution.
The contract with Nielsen ended in early 2019 with BARC officials unofficially commenting that it would develop its own digital measurement solution. After Nilsen’s exit, various advertisers started expressing doubts about BARC’s intention and capability for doing the cross-media research with TV and digital media. In October, 2019 Partha Dasgupta, then CEO of BARC resigned from BARC and the plan for Ekam, which was largely his brainchild, also got buried.
After a year, in October 2020, Mumbai Police began investigating a possible tampering of TRP data by certain news channels. The entire episode made a severe dent in the reputation of BARC as a fair audience research agency. The case is yet to be resolved. Following this incident, in November 2020, Ministry of I&B set up an expert committee to review the guidelines for TV Rating agencies. The committee submitted its report to the MIB in January, 2021, however, the ministry is yet to make any announcement about the findings or any proposed new guidelines for TV Rating agencies.
In October 2020, BARC Board announced the suspension of audience estimates and ratings for a period of three months after requesting its technical committee to review and augment the standards and methodology of measuring, estimating and reporting the TV Ratings data. The suspension has got extended beyond three months showing hardly any effect on the advertising revenue of the news channels. In September 2021, NBF (News Broadcasters Federation) again appealed to BARC for resuming the release of News Channels’ ratings, which however were not released before the festive season of 2021 (https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/the-curious-case-of-missing-tv-news-channel-ratings-11631127883629.html).
Meantime, comScore continues to conduct independent audience research for digital media in India and Google and Meta (earlier Facebook) continue to provide the industry with their own analytics about digital audience. Nielsen and Kantar, two of the large international market research agency networks operating in India have announced their capabilities in conducting cross-media research. Earlier in 2021 https://www.printpower.eu/insight/cross-media/ wrote “The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) is spearheading a global ‘North Star’ initiative to standardise cross-media measurement through a panel and census framework that will help the industry get a greater understanding of reach and frequency. Such valuable multi-channel insights could prevent billions of dollars being wasted and improve customer experience through avoiding excessive ad frequency.”
The same article also reported about the contract for the first world-wide total cross-media solutions project across TV, digital, radio and published media being awarded jointly to Kantar and Ipsos working in partnership with National Media Onderzoek (NMO) in the Netherlands. The article commented “This ground-breaking cross-measurement solution will deliver the building blocks for cross-media planning, allowing advertisers to better understand their consumers, improve the targeting of brand messages, determine how media triggers consumer purchase decisions and maximise ROI.”
It is a pity that in India, where initiatives about media audience research were taken as early as in late 1960s with the first National Readership Survey (NRS) by ORG published in 1970 followed by second NRS in 1978 jointly by ORG and IMRB, the third NRS in 1983-84 by IMRB and the fourth NRS in 1990 jointly by IMRB and MARG before Indian Readership Survey (IRS) by MRUC began its journey, has failed to go forward in this field. It is high time that the advertisers and the agencies take a stock of the situation and take corrective measures for ensuring the way forward for conducting cross-media audience research.
Indrani Sen is a veteran advertising professional and a media specialist. She is now an academic, and writes on MxMIndia every Monday. Her views here are personal