Demystifying Genre: Why the male 25+ TG is relevant for news channels
Television in India has seen various broadcasters look at measurement data in ways that bring out the strength of the channel. While that is one of the purposes of data, there is only one target and market from the advertiser point of view, and the relevant parameters become stringent for niche genres. exchange4media spoke to a few media leaders to set straight what the parameters are for specific genres. This week begins with the news genre.
There is barely a large television event that passes by without a flurry of information from various channels claiming the numero uno position. The same holds true week-on-week with channels dissecting markets, target groups and day parts to emphasise better numbers. While that is one aspect in which measurement data helps broadcasters in tracking their strengths and weaknesses, from an advertiser point of view, the relevant market, target and day part, at the broad level, doesn’t change often.
To demystify what rating-scores really make the difference to a genre, exchange4media spoke to a few media observers to find out what target groups and markets they viewed to gauge the performance of a channel.
Target Group and Markets seen at a generic level for news channels
One obvious fact is that English news channels, both general and business, play a very different role for advertisers from the Hindi news channels. The target group for English news channels is generally the upwardly mobile male TG. A secondary target that has been gaining strength in this genre is the working women TG.
R Gowthaman, Leader, Mindshare South Asia, stated, “The media consumption pattern and the nature of the content determine the relevant targets and markets for any genre. When it comes to the English news genre, the target is very clear, given the nature of the genre – it is SEC ABC male 25+. The smaller markets don’t make sense for this genre, and so it makes sense to observe the 1 million plus markets, that include the metros, for this genre.”
Incidentally, every media expert that exchange4media spoke to agreed with this target. Punitha Arumugam, Group CEO, Madison Media, elaborated, “A 22+ TG, since that is usually when education is getting over and people begin working, would have been a more relevant group to look at. However, the present data doesn’t allow that cut, so it is the 25+ that one looks at.”
Arumugam, too, stated that the male TG was the more relevant TG, but all adults became the second relevant TG for this genre. Lodestar Universal COO Nandini Dias had more to offer on this point. She explained, “The media consumption pattern of a working woman is also very similar to that of her male counterparts. And so you would see that a SEC ABC 25+ female also is seen on news channels.”
For Hindi news channels, too, the primary target group seen is the SEC ABC Male 25+, and only in the Hindi speaking markets. However, in this case, too, since the nature of the genre is more “mass”, the female TG again is a strong group that becomes relevant to this genre. Many planners observe the all adults (C&S ABC M&F 25+) target to gauge the performance of Hindi news channels.
The parameters vary from brand to brand
According to various media planners and buyers, the relevant target and market for a genre depends on trends and media consumption patterns built over time.
T Gangadhar, MD, Mediaedge: CIA India, too, stated the same parameters for news channels as the other experts, and like the other media leaders, he, too, pointed out that the relevant target was from a brand point of view than a channel point of view. Hence, it would vary from brand to brand, and more importantly, from the requirement of the brand at the time. He explained, “Various brands have variants targeted at different segments. When that happens, even in the same genre, you can pick one channel for the upper SECs and another one for the lower SECs.”
One thing that all experts stated was that they seldom went by what the channels stated their performance to be. Gowthaman said, “It can give you an indicator, may be at times a different point of view, but definitely every agency would have to look at their own numbers and go by their own analysis.”
Media service agencies have different ways of measuring the performance of various channels. Citing an example, Dias explained, “We have something called the Prism, where you feed four components – time spent, reach, clutter, TG skew and CPRPs (cost per rating point) – that finally gives us the ‘channel worth’. We do not look at channel shares in any instance.”
The media experts also said that while this was the picture from the ratings standpoint, when it came to news channels, other parameters like the content of the channel, its image and hence, the credibility of the channel, played a very important role too.
