Everyone slices & dices numbers a lot, which leads to lack of stability: Shashi Sinha

When you bring together the BARC India Chairman; Former member of BARC Board of Directors; Heads of two of India’s leading News networks; Senior executive of one of India’s oldest homegrown businesses; and add a seasoned Industry analyst to the mix – sparks are bound to fly.

The power-packed panel discussion on ‘Resolving the TV ratings tangle – once and for all’ on Day 1 of Adgully’s SCREENXX Summit & Awards 2022, held yesterday (November 17, 2022), was a riveting, no-holds-barred and candid deliberation among the leading industry luminaries.

The panel was chaired by Ashish Bhasin, Co-Founder and Chairman, RD&X Network. The esteemed speakers included:

Shashi Sinha, Chief Executive Officer, IPG Mediabrands India and Chairman, BARC India

Avinash Pandey, Chief Executive Officer, ABP Network and President, NBDA

Rajiv Dubey, Head Of Media, Dabur India

Joy Chakraborty, Chief Business Officer, Zee Media Corporation

Karan Taurani, Senior Vice President, Elara Capital

At the outset Ashish Bhasin said that if one looked back a few decades ago, there was a huge tangle the ratings scenario in the television industry, but not today. Laying the groundwork for the discussion, Bhasin took a step back to stated that industry, which was a very fast growing industry in television and which was so important, was being traded on a currency which people didn’t have faith on. “And just to recall, all the industry constituents came together and BARC was formed, which was joint effort by the entire industry – it didn’t belong to any one player. The broadcasters, advertisers, advertising agencies and the authorities got together and that’s how BARC was formed,” Bhasin pointed out.

Continuing further, he said, “It’s fair to say that it has had tremendous impact on the Indian advertising industry, particularly the television and broadcasting industry and hopefully now going forward on the digital front as well. But it is equally pertinent to note that there have been some issues; there have been some very big success areas and there have been some areas where BARC has, by some players, been found to be a little wanting.”

Directing his first question to Shashi Sinha, whom Bhasin referred to as the ‘Bheeshma Pitamah’ of the industry, Bhasin said, “My personal opinion is that BARC has really done well, but has been under-appreciated in many areas. But equally there happen to be several areas, some of which have been very much in the public eye, which have brought it – I would say – infamy, and we haven’t really been able to carry all the constituents along with us as we possibly should have and would have. What are your views on this and where do you see areas where we can make some more improvement and come together as an industry so that the ecosystem thrives better?”

Sinha admitted there were issues, but before coming to those issues, he built on what Bhasin said about BARC. “The interesting thing is that BARC is seen as one of the finest bodies in research for a country like India to be set up – for 2 lakh-plus homes and the way it is structured, and the technology that is used. Even till three or four years back in the US, there was no metering.”

He pointed out that there some challenges that very unique to India – it is a heterogeneous market, there have been behaviour changes, and therefore to capture the changes in the heterogeneity requires effort. “There is homogeneity in certain kind of viewing, like the Hindi viewing, but there is a certain amount of heterogeneity which we are not capturing. As you know, India is one of the largest markets for television broadcasting – with 800+ channels – and it is very fragmented, so that fragmentation also comes into research. Thus, error levels crop up. BARC was designed for a particular error level. Today, from the broadcast side, the agencies’ side and the clients’ side, everyone does a lot of slicing and dicing of numbers, which leads to lack of stability and then unfortunately the ecosystem is such that we find a fair degree of interference in these markets – in a lot of European markets you don’t find interference. So, it is a sum total of various factors,” he added.

According to Sinha, one of the ways forward – of course, the technology is being put in place – one way of scaling it up is RPD (return path data). He noted that the Government has created a committee to look into RPD and they have set some guidelines and they will build on that. “But it is not a complete solution, there will be many complications. So, I think if you look at television, there are broad indications that they are in the right direction. If you start slicing and dicing and if you start looking at detailed data in a particular way, obviously you can go wrong because the error levels are so high,” he further said.

Sinha affirmed, “I believe there are many things that are going for BARC – the technology, the systems that are in place, it is an industry body.”

Bhasin, while directing his next question to Avinash Pandey, pointed out that any system is as good as its participants want it to be. And one of the big criticisms that BARC has had over the years – in fact even the previous ratings agency TAM had faced over the years – is that some of the some of the constituents were deliberately trying to bypass the system or find ways to go around the system. “What can we do to prevent that?” Bhasin asked.

Responding to the question, Pandey quipped, “I have always believed that you always have a well-behaved neighbour if your fences are strong. The rules, regulations and laws and their delivery actually deliver you the desired behaviour from the members or the constituents that you cater to. If we have made the rules, for example, that you will not publish data in the public domain unless there is a clear cut strategy, despite that there are multiple channels which are rotating their logo as No. 1 in the country, which is further confusing the audience as well as their own employees about what ranking the channel has.”

He lamented that despite having those rules, BARC does act against those channels. “As far as the manipulation goes, people look at the ways and means to get the market share in their domain,” Pandey added.

Meanwhile, presenting his views as an industry analyst, Karan Taurani said, “If you look at this scenario, with whatever controversies that have happened within BARC, I think this definitely has had a very big negative impact as far as News genre is concerned. An evaluation of the news companies saw crash overnight because of this factor which was there.”

Praising BARC, Taurani said, “I think BARC as a measurement medium is also one of the best. Let’s look at the other forms of medium where an investor really wants to park money such as Print and Radio. They also do their forms of measurement, but none of them are even close to what BARC does in terms of the quality of work and the detailing that they have.”

Joy Chakraborty spoke about Zee Media’s decision not to take part in BARC and said, “Till now we all thought that we were content companies. We thought that producing good content was the best way forward. But I have seen in my 30 years that content is king, no doubt, but distribution is kingdom. So, we all have realised how important a role distribution plays – BARC is the measurement of distribution – that’s one point that we all need to be clear about. The recent move that Zee Media Group took is that we have not withdrawn from BARC, but we have suspended BARC ratings. BARC is measuring our ratings, we have asked them not to release it until we get our queries answered. The watermarks are still on.”

Rajiv Dubey presented the client’s point of view and pointed out how the whole BARC system was founded by the entire industry put together – TV channels, agencies, clients. He noted that the ZEE network was the propagator, led by the Puneet Goenka, the founder-chairman of BARC.

Continuing further on the ratings tangle, Dubey pointed out, “If you are not No. 1, you don’t like it, which is what happens in every industry. This whole thing has been started by two things – it is not only people going to the landing pages, somebody trying to switch on-switch off the TV channels 15 times in a day, those numbers are very small. The people who do this, the smaller MSOs, their numbers are very small compared to the rest of the country. The rest of the country comprises 40 million of BARC, about 67 million of DTH, the big MSOs carry only GECs on landing pages. So, barring these three big players, there are very few numbers which are left.”

“Now that takes us to the overall TV viewership numbers – our battle today in the TV industry is not among ourselves, our battle is with people who are not watching TV at all     – people who are switch off from TV, people who are watching TV on some other format like YouTube, etc. Moreover, if you look at the viewership of TV, especially news channels, that’s been sinking from a high of around 20 per cent two years back at the time when the pandemic began, to the current times when it has shrunk to about 3.8 per cent. And all the 32 Hindi News channels share this 3.8 per cent viewership. And within this somebody is trying to put themselves on landing pages and somebody is doing something else. Obviously, somebody who is there on the landing pages is the winner right now, and somebody who is not, is not spending money on band distribution is not. And similarly these same networks use the landing pages to their advantage whenever it suits them and they don’t use landing page when it doesn’t suit them. Basically landing pages are used to trigger some kind of viewership changes – that’s what is becoming clear now.”

In Dubey’s view, first of all, the landing pages should be called out – whichever channel is using landing page it should be declared, saying that this difference is owning to the landing page. Secondly, as ISA it is very difficult to say whether or not to take a channel which is not getting measured. “We are all listed companies and we are answerable to our shareholders. We cannot put money behind a channel which is not getting measured – something that is measured will always be preferred by the advertisers,” he added.

For the complete discussion, watch below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBLcESjOVv0