Broadcast industry's wishlist for new BARC CEO Nakul Chopra

As Nakul Chopra gears to take charge as the third CEO of Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India from tomorrow (August 25, 2021), the broadcast industry is looking forward to the resolution of some contentious issues during his tenure.

Chopra is no stranger to BARC India’s operations, having joined its Board in 2016 and a year later, being elected its Chairman. At the time of taking charge as the BARC Chairman, Chopra had listed Ekam’s rollout, next Universe re-estimation and update, insight products and effort to sign up more distribution platforms for RPD as his key focus areas, in an earlier interaction with Adgully.

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EKAM rollout, BARC as data+insights Co top Nakul Chopra’s agenda in 2018

So far, there has been no official statement from Chopra ever since the news about his being appointed the new BARC CEO surfaced. However, the industry is ready with its wishlist and the topmost on this list is resolving all the issues related to the TRP scam and taking definitive steps to avoid such instances from occurring again. The industry is looking for course correction measures to restore credibility of the BARC ratings system and trust in the mechanism.

Restoring the ratings mechanism for the news channels genre ranks equally high on the broadcasters’ wishlist. Several news broadcasters have stressed how lack of news channel ratings has been hurting their ad revenues.

Greater transparency also ranks high, as the industry is still reeling under the impact of the massive TRP manipulation and corruption carried out by the top management under former BARC CEO Partho Dasgupta.