BARC India rolls out landing page algorithms; gets ISA’s support

As a part of its ongoing ‘Data Validation Quality Initiative’ aimed at improving measurement science and mitigating impact on viewership of extraneous factors, in September 2020, BARC India had announced that it will be introducing algorithms into its data validation method to mitigate the impact of landing page on viewership data across all genres of channels.

Over the last five years, BARC India has received extensive feedback from its stakeholders on the potential ‘forced viewing’ created due to the practice of using Landing Pages. Basis the study undertaken by BARC India, its Oversight Committee and its Technical Committee, it was concluded that use of a Landing Page by a channel exaggerates viewership estimates by ‘forcing viewership’. Statistical evidence also demonstrated that use of Landing Pages exaggerates ratings estimates. Therefore, inclusion of this false exaggeration in the ratings would mean that BARC India would not be accurately estimating and reporting ‘What India Watches’.

In June 2019, the BARC India Board tasked the Oversight Committee to ‘review the effectiveness of the current practice of measuring and isolating abnormal increases in reach and to recommend changes, if any’. Post an extensive review, the Oversight Committee suggested that, whilst the existing method was reasonable, it was based on symptomatic statistics and if possible, should be improved, or replaced, with a method that directly uses inferential statistics.

“The results of hundreds of hours of research and several months of rigorous development and testing are very promising. BARC India will now be able to mitigate any landing page anomaly to better reflect viewer’s choice,” said Dr Derrick Gray, Chief of Measurement Science & Business Analytics, BARC India. He added, “The existing method was based on symptomatic statistics and we have improved upon it with a method that directly uses inferential statistics to deliver better results across all genres.”

Now, the Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA) has come out in support of BARC India’s algorithms for landing page. In a statement issued, the ISA said that BARC India’s ‘Data Validation Quality Initiative’ was aimed at improving measurement science and mitigating the impact on viewership of extraneous factors.

The statement also quoted Sunil Kataria, Chairman, ISA, as saying, “BARC algorithm detects landing pages with a very high success rate and once detected, the algorithm seeks to remove any forced viewership and voluntary viewership gets counted as real viewership for that channel. This is a fair method and that the advertisers are aligned on the solution executed by BARC on the issue of landing page viewership.”