TV measurement should be put in order before embarking on cross-media measurement: NBDA

The News Broadcasters and Digital Association (NBDA) has suggested that Broadcasters Audience Research Council (BARC) India must improve the existing TV viewership measurement system before embarking on the TV + Digital measurement system.

In its submission to the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (MIB) last year, NBDA had also suggested that the sample size to figure out television ratings must be increased from the existing 44,000 as it would make the data received more reliable and credible. The key highlights of the NBDA's suggestions to the MIB were mentioned in its annual report for FY22.

In November 2021, MIB sought suggestions/comments from industry bodies, including NBDA on the report 'Review the Guidelines on TV Ratings Agencies in India'. The MIB had formed a committee headed by former Prasar Bharati CEO Shashi Shekhar to offer suggestions on improving the existing TV rating system. The committee submitted the report in January 2021.

It is pertinent to note that Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA) Chairman Sunil Kataria had recently stated that the association is closely working with BARC to "come up with a unified cross-media measurement method" which is expected to roll out in the first half of 2023. ISA is a stakeholder in BARC.

The NBDA also suggested that there is a need for strong corporate governance required at the level of the Board of BARC. NBDA submitted that the Technical and Oversight Committees in BARC should not only consist of independent members but should also include members from all stakeholders as stakeholders are equally concerned with transparency and data sanctity relating to BARC.

The TV news body also stated that it must get a representation on the BARC Board. "Since ‘News’ is a very important genre, NBDA must get representation on the Board to enable it to give critical inputs to BARC on any issues relating to the ratings of news channels," it stated.

While it supported the recommendations on the use of the Return Path Data (RPD) process, NBDA has expressed its apprehension about how RPD would be implemented. NBDA suggested that RPD should not be plainly extrapolating the panel data riddled with anomalies.

It added that two independent streams should be generated instead and RPD should take over in due time. NBDA also suggested that a pattern recognition for Landing user behaviour and Dual LCN behaviour should also be added.

NBDA was also of the view that unless research design is simplified, crowdsourcing of viewership data will suffer from the same problems as the RPD process in terms of cost, inaccuracy, the possibility of manipulation of data, and concerns around data privacy. "Therefore, for an audience viewership system to work, the primary focus should be on research design and collection of input level data," it suggested.

The association suggested that BARC should develop a mechanism to remove spikes created by undue means like Dual LCN, landing page or any kind of tampering. It added that BARC's investments should go beyond Watermark excuses and attempt to actually find the Dual and Landing feed as there is a need to incentivize such innovation and nurture start-ups in this space.

NBDA submitted that it is imperative to adopt an open data ecosystem approach, wherein both rating algorithms and raw data sets are openly available to academics and independent researchers to analyse, validate and enrich. NBDA suggested that this could be set up as a regular academic exercise to evaluate and enrich the data system by BARC as it thinks appropriate to make the rating system more transparent.