BARC in crisis of its own creation: Avinash Pandey

The credibility crisis being faced by the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India is its creation, ABP Network CEO Avinash Pandey said while speaking at the unveiling of Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2022.

Delivering a keynote on the topic, ‘The need of the hour: Credible numbers and authentic sources’, Pandey listed down the issues that news broadcasters have with the existing audience measurement system. He also offered solutions to BARC India, which, he believes, will help it reclaim the trust of the TV industry in general and the news channels in particular.

“BARC seems to be leading a crisis which is its creation. One of the industry leaders has been quoted as saying that broadcasters should get out of BARC because it has been a huge letdown. Another industry leader has said that news channels need to be measured on accuracy, independence, and depth,” Pandey said.

Pandey said that the utility of audience measurement data goes beyond media buying and selling. Viewership data, he said, also plays a key role in content creation. “We don’t use data only for ad sales, but we also use it to create better content,” he said while adding that an authentic and trustworthy data will go a long in improving the quality of content on news channels.

On being asked if the content on news channels has changed over the last 18 months in the absence of ratings, Pandey explained, “Let me cite the example of the farmer protests. When a vehicle ran over some protesting farmers, that news ran for two days. If you compare that story with another story in a similar part of UP where a girl’s body was burnt in the middle of the night, entire Indian news channels were sitting on that farmer story. Sometimes I wonder about ad safety. If the same formula is getting applied by agencies, the news content will never change. Over the last 18 months, there were fewer songs and less drama on news channels. I remember, on weekends, we used to spend a lot of money calling artistes who will sing songs. This has changed now,” he said.

Pandey averred that the BARC needs to follow a four-pronged approach to solve the rating crisis. He suggested that the BARC must improve its sampling and population estimates. Further, it should also make structural and operational improvements besides improving governance through transparency and accountability, expansion of board, appointing an independent chairman and independent members.

He also recommended that the audience measurement body must correct the metrics of TV ratings and include cross-screen measurement since content consumption is happening on multiple screens like TV, mobile and Connected TV (CTV).

Commenting on BARC’s measurement system in view of the changing media consumption behaviour, he said, “BARC has not done much on it, we did some study across UP, Punjab and Uttarakhand, and we went to towns and villages to understand this.  What we found is that people rely on VODs over live TV, and sadly it’s not reflecting and rightly valued in our measurement systems. That is a serious matter for our industry to solve.

“The next change that is going to happen, for which even BARC is not ready, is that with one subscription you can watch content on multiple devices, and cable operations are focusing on this change in a big way. So, this new subscription is not just for TV at home but for watching content anywhere. There is no discussion on how to tackle this changing viewer. A common system of measurement is needed,” he mentioned.

Pandey shared that the need of the hour is to have credible numbers from authentic sources. To make it happen, BARC needs to act with the speed and the change that is happening around the world, he added. He also said that the inability of BARC to build credibility even after seven years of operations is an embarrassment.

“Look at the BARC panel of 55k metered boxes for 210 million, the sample size is really low, it’s nothing for the size of a country like India. In India, every 15 to 20 kms, the culture and food habits are different and we are all still trying to sell them the same breakfast, based on the data that BARC produces,” he said.

While asking BARC to reflect on its mistakes and make amends, Pandey said that the news industry didn’t feel the absence of BARC data during the 15-month blackout period. Elaborating further, he said that the revenue of the top three news broadcasters grew by 15-30 per cent in the last nine months despite the unavailability of viewership data. He added that the profitability of top news broadcasters improved while sanity returned to prime-time programming.

Advertisers and ad agencies, Pandey said, relied on other metrics to make their buying decision. This, he said, brings into question the efficacy of BARC for the news channels. “Rupert Murdoch used to say that people should hate you or like you, but they should not ignore you. What has happened with BARC is that it has reached that level. It simply did not matter, or nobody bothered about it. If for 18 months business can do better without data, what is the justification for ROI on BARC,” he elucidated.

“If something is substantial to boost business, that something is really important, but if something is not working, it’s nothing,” he said.

According to Pandey, the growth for the news genre has not accelerated under BARC India when compared with the rating system under TAM. He also said the growth in the news genre has happened on the back of new product launches, focus on digital, and diversification of business by news broadcasters.

Getting into the specifics of the news industry’s grouse against BARC, Pandey pointed out that BARC did incorrect revisions in the Universe Estimates without an establishment study even as the ecosystem saw multiple changes on the ground, like the implementation of the New Tariff Order (NTO), Covid-19 and the resultant mass migration. “Current linear universe estimates are flawed and revisions need to be subject to above factors,” he said referring to NTO and Covid-19.

Touching upon the governance issue, Pandey said that the TV news industry is not represented adequately on BARC. Therefore, the issues concerning news channels are not getting resolved. He feels that the entertainment broadcasters have an advantage as they are majority shareholders in BARC. “News genre is under-represented on BARC and its committees even though there are more news channels in the country than GEC. Most of the decision-makers on BARC are from entertainment channels,” he stated.

“BARC is not selling a product, it is charging money from what you earn. If I have five customers and one customer pays me Rs 100 crore while other customers pay me just Rs 5 crore, whose interest will I project? So as broadcasters, when news channels give you Rs 30 crore versus a single GEC channel giving you Rs 30 crore, whose interest will you look at?

In the large pool of money that BARC looks at as a source of revenue, they did not know how to treat regional channels and news channels.

Can you imagine that when one panel of Bangalore goes on leave, the entire viewership of the genre in south goes down, which means no one is watching it. In the pecking order, the number one news channel in the state of Maharashtra was Star Majha, and when BARC came in, its ratings went down. Just because the rating system has come into place doesn’t mean the people have changed their choice of channels. That’s why I say, BARC works for GECs and not for news channels,” he said.

Pandey said that the mode of signal reception should be a primary variable rather than a second variable for measurement. Therefore, the data of high-definition (HD) subscribers is not captured effectively. He also pointed out that BARC has increased DD Free Dish households from 28.7 million in Broadcast India (BI) 2018 study to 42.5 million without any BI study.

“Someone said that 20 per cent homes are HD homes and our distribution data is almost similar. There is not enough incentive for news broadcasters to launch HD channels. As a network, though we want to launch HD channels with differentiated content, we do not have enough incentive,” he said.

Touching upon the issue of landing pages, Pandey said that the practice of buying landing page of TV distribution platforms is distorting news viewership data gathering. “Today no matter how good a content you create, somebody goes and buys a landing page and BARC will start showing that people have started liking it much more than anything else.”

He also had a word of caution for BARC when he said that the news broadcasters can create a parallel system of data gathering which will be based on technology. “World is changing, platforms want to own data. What if news channels start owning and sharing their live data? As a news broadcaster, we are aggressively working in that direction. We will create a parallel system that is based on technology rather than sample homes. In that case what will be the future of BARC?” he questioned.