Television measurement seems to be a permanent battlefield: Paritosh Joshi
Media analyst Paritosh Joshi traversed through the entire television ratings measurement landscape in his keynote address on ‘Resolving the TV Ratings Tangle - Once and For All’ on Day 1 of Adgully’s premier event SCREENXX Summit and Awards 2022 on November 17, 2022.
At the very outset, Joshi made it clear that he was speaking in his personal capacity as “somebody who is deeply interested in and involved with measurement in general and television measurement in particular”, and stressed that “I do not represent BARC and I do not speak for BARC”.
He started out by addressing the elephant in the room, which is that television measurement seems to be a permanent battlefield. While noting that there are always some parties who are angry and unhappy with whatever is happening in the world of measurement, Joshi also said that many people are not interested in the nuts and bolts of how the measurement system actually functions. “What they get upset about is what it means to them in terms of numbers that it produces. So, the anger or irritation I don’t think is too often about the mechanics of measurement or the processes of measurement, but almost inevitably it is always about the output that comes, which is the weekly numbers that the measurement system puts out.”
He went on to state how in the last few years in India that issue has in particular got focussed on the News genre. “It appears that the News genre is most palpably angry and that has, in fact, had many twists and turns, including a long period when there were no ratings being offered for the News genre in its totality and then BARC in consultation with the news broadcasters association and others decided to start publishing rolled data, which is a four-week moving average and even that has had many issues that have been raised by the news industry,” he added.
Here, he pointed out that this phenomenon is not uniquely true of India, in fact, wherever television measurement exists – and television measurement now probably exists in 100 jurisdictions around the world – there is always some strife and some struggle, and this largely arises from the old principle of shooting the messenger if one doesn’t like the message. “In fact, I have even seen criticisms of the ratings system by people who are commentators on the News industry that it is because rating exists that news becomes terribly tabloidy and sensationalist and populist, etc. I believe that in all of these cases you are inverting the order of cause and effect,” Joshi remarked.
While stating that measurement is not free of controversy anywhere in the world, he also stressed that measurement systems do not set out to please anybody. “Measurement systems should only intend to tell the truth and report exactly what the market is really saying about what channel, what show, what day part, what genre was watched and when and by whom. That’s all,” he maintained.
At the same time, Joshi observed, “We, as content producers, as broadcasters always want a larger slice of the viewing, a larger slice of the footprint, a larger slice of the audience, and if we don’t get it, then either it makes us strive to get more or it makes us angry and it starts causing us to basically berate the messenger – this messenger being the measurement system.”
According to him, there is no remedy to this, because if there are winners of any measurement system, then inevitably there will be losers. Giving an idea of the magnitude of the measurement universe in India, Joshi pointed out that BARC measures 600 broadcast platforms, which may well be the most number of broadcast platforms that a single system integrated across the country measures. He added that while some might argue that the Nielsen system in the US measures more frequencies, he explained that, that is because they measure at, what is known as, a designated market area level. “But for nationally telecast satellite-based channel services, I do believe that BARC is the single largest. BARC is also the single largest in terms of the installed base metered homes. The BARC system measures almost 2 lakh people on a continuous basis – 24 hours of the day, all the time – and these 2 lakh people are representative of the TV viewing population of the country.”
Continuing further, Joshi pointed out that it is a very large panel. In a statistical sense it’s a very sound, solid and well-executed panel. Can it get better? He was confident of it getting better in a variety of ways and that it is a continuous improvement thing. He further said that the industry needs to think of in terms of audio-visual content measurement, because the TV actually has made way for multiple screens on which we consume what would conventionally be considered television content. “So, a natural path forward is that a measurement system sort of broadens sideways to encompass more viewing platforms, and this is already happening in many parts of the world. It is safe to assume that it’s a territory that BARC will inhabit in the relatively near term. What the BARC system does right now is that it already provides a basis for a massive amount of advertising transactions. Television continued to be the single largest advertising medium, not just in this country but around the world. Periodically people write the obituaries of television and declare that television will soon be extinct and basically digital media will drive out linear television, but as that famous old quip has it, the rumours of the death of television are vastly exaggerated and vastly premature,” Joshi said emphatically.
For the complete keynote address, watch below:
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