By Amit Nevrekar
It was seen that when TAM was suspended for a few weeks last year, Agencies and Broadcasters relied on social media, Facebook, Twitter for content likeness, especially for new launches.
Tapping this phenomenon, can we have similar measurement which is not restricted to Facebook, Twitter but open to all masses pan-India at a minimal research cost. I’m talking about mobile phone medium which has the highest penetration of 900 million+ connections.
It could simply work with unique 5-7 digit telecodes randomly generated everyday and displayed on channels’ programmes.
The audiences would just need to give one ring/ missed call to assign their likes. It could also have the capability to accept comments via SMS and post on Facebook.
The motivation to give missed calls can be done through channel promotions, contests etc. USSD questionnaire could be sent to these audiences to collect basic demographic information.
The benefit of this method is that you could even understand content likeliness at individual market level like Kolhapur, Nashik, Nagpur etc. The main differentiation is that it’s actual audience response, NOT a sample survey and is independent of mode of access and place of viewing. IPL could easily get more missed calls than gross eyeballs over the 45 days period. It could be termed as ‘Television Response Measurement’ or TRM.
It would be better to have such study rather than each broadcaster and agency conducting their own research through different research agencies, till BARC rating system is rolled out.
Amit Nevrekar is COO, AdoRoi Inc and co-author, The Advertising Mess