Business Today: Editorial

Don't Throw The Baby Out

The most ridiculous aspect of last fortnight's ratings brouhaha was not the leakage of the ''confidential'' lists of names and addresses of those who form a part of the audience that determines television ratings points (TRPs), but the reaction of yesterday's programming king, Zee Telefilms.

Sure, Zee is justified in questioning the authenticity and validity of the ratings system of A.C. Nielsen's tam Media and ORG-MARG's in tam, but for its CEO to reportedly declare that Zee won't recognise this system, and that it will use its own viewership statistics to woo advertisers, smacks of ignorance, or opportunism, or both.

Indeed, it is surprising that Zee TV has chosen to raise a stink about TRPs at a time when it has revamped almost its entire programming. The channel, would after all, have some improvements in ratings to talk about-unless of course, initial trends revealed that not much was coming out of the much-hyped revamp.

The rating agencies, for their part, have become a sitting scapegoat. Other than the leak, question marks abound regarding the concentration of peoplemeter households in certain pockets, increasing the probability of manipulation.

So whilst there's plenty of speculation regarding the source of the leak-which zeroes in on non-performing channels-there's another equally-large school of thought that believes that the performing channels and content creators have relied on manipulation to boost ratings.

There's little doubt that the current tam-in tam systems stink. But that doesn't mean that the time has come to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The peoplemeter ratings system isn't a perfect one, but it's proven to be the most effective one in the West. There are few other alternatives. Decisions on ad spend can't be taken on the basis of ''qualitative'' assessments. For, if a media planner decides his allocations based on how good he thinks a programme is, you surely can't expect his judgment to match that of viewers in Ludhiana or Latur. So, rather than go by how much a programme is ''liked'', the rating companies try and answer two questions: Who is watching, and what is being watched? That's a democratic-enough method.

It's not even the apparently-tiny sample size that is the problem. The outcry in one section of the media is: How can close to Rs 4,000 crore worth of advertising be decided on the basis of just some 600 homes in Mumbai, and 8,500-odd homes all over the country? It can. But only if the sample is representative.

Yet, by choosing homes in clusters, the rating agencies aren't doing themselves any favours. This may make it easier for them to collect data, but leaves them exposed to charges of abetting manipulation.

In the US, for instance, Nielsen Media Research has installed an overnight meter in 53 of the nation's largest television markets, which represent 65 per cent of the country's total viewership. The sample size in each market isn't really large-just 400 -but what makes the exercise credible is the representation in vital markets. Nielsen backs this up with its national ratings, which uses a sample of 5,000.

So, more than increasing sample sizes, the focus of our rating agencies should be on making the samples more representative. Samples should be churned more often, and more comprehensively. Ongoing audit and quality checks will also help. And a merger of the two agencies-which follow different parameters, often resulting in diverging results-has to take place ASAP. If all this does happen, shaken-up advertisers will have more faith in the ratings -certainly more faith than they would have in an individual broadcaster digging out his own viewership numbers.

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