The Hindu Business Line : Measuring audience behaviour

Audience measurement is an area of market research that has generated a lot of interest and its share of controversy as well. Interest, because so much media expenditure is based on the results, and controversy because various people over time have questioned their accuracy and reliability.

Let us first understand what this field is all about. As we all know, large sums of advertising expenditure are committed to media such as TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and hoardings. Marketers need some means of deciding which paper to place their ad in, or which particular TV serial to sponsor, or what time of day is suitable for radio spots, and so on. The key criteria used here are,

How many people can hear/ see the ad?

What is the profile of those people? Are they the target audience?

How many people can one reach at least once with a campaign run with many spots?

How many people will see an ad many times with such a campaign?

The leading audience measurement systems in the country are TAM – for measuring television audiences; RAM – for measuring radio audiences; and NRS & IRS for measuring the readership of newspapers and magazines

TAM or TV Audience Measurement is run using a product called the People Meter. A sample of households is selected based on the principle of random sampling. If they agree, a people meter unit is placed in their houses and connected to the TV set. The meter’s technology is equipped to track when the TV is switched on and off, and the channel being viewed.

Each member in the household is allotted a unique button / switch on the meter. As soon as (say) the father walks in to watch TV, he has to switch his button ON, and OFF when he walks out. The meter thus records not just the programmes played on the TV, but also who watches what programme. Since the meter can be programmed to track changes in the TV status every few seconds, it measures not just programme viewership but also the viewership of individual ads, which is what an advertiser is really interested in once the campaign is on air. The panel size all over the country runs into several thousands, and hence provides some degree of statistical reliability too.

RAM, which stands – predictably – for Radio Audience Measurement, is not as sophisticated as TAM is in terms of data accuracy and technology. In this, each panel member is expected to enter his / her details of radio listening in a diary, including details such as the time-slot listened to, the duration and station listened to. Though it would appear that such a system is bound to have many inaccuracies, such as people not carrying the diary around and forgetting to record, independent studies have shown that RAM does quite a decent job actually.

NRS and IRS are competing readership surveys in the Indian market. The studies have many points of similarities. Essentially, both involve contacting large numbers of people selected randomly (sample size is more than 200,000) and asking them which newspapers and magazines they read. These studies have the advantage of large sample sizes to ensure statistical rigor. Interestingly, despite the fact that both have such large sample sizes and are broadly similar in approach, they often report different results. There are various reasons for this apparent discrepancy, which are beyond the scope of this article.

All the audience measurement systems project the data from the sample to the country’s population as a whole. Given the fact that several thousand crores of advertising rupees are spent based on this data, there are elaborate security procedures in place to protect the panel members’ identities and field personnel’s routes.

Finally, it should be a matter of pride for all of us that the systems in India are every bit as sophisticated as the audience measurement systems in the US and Western Europe.

(Contributed by Ashok R. Sankethi, CEO, Kaybase, a business consulting firm. Mail: ashok@kaybase.com)

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