The brouhaha over New Delhi Television?s (NDTV) allegations against television audience measurement agency TAM Media Research (TAM) refuses to die down. Acting independently of the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF), the apex body for news broadcasters in India, News Broadcasters Association (NBA) has sent a letter to information and broadcasting minister Ambika Soni for demanding government intervention in the ratings business.
The body said that the ministry ought to order an independent audit of TAM’s television ratings. The audit should be done by an impartial, third party and the audit report should be made public, NBA said. Until such time that the audit is in place, the ratings company should not be allowed to publish ratings for any of the broadcast companies.
The move by the NBA to touch base directly with the ministry has raised doubts on whether NBA has enough faith in the IBF’s ability to resolve the ratings matter.
A month back, broadcast company NDTV heaped corruption charges against TAM and filed a case against its parents ? market research firm The Nielsen Co. and Kantar Media ? in the state of New York. IBF is the representative body of television broadcasters in India. Many of the news broadcasters who are part of the NBA, are also part of the IBF.
Rohit Gupta, president of broadcast company Multi Screen Media which runs several entertainment channels, said that he did not understand why the NBA needed to act on its own accord, if the IBF was already dealing with the matter. Some of the demands made by the NBA are unreasonable, he said.
?News broadcasters have their own angst, I am sure. But to get TAM to temporarily suspend viewership data is an extreme step and can have negative repercussions for the entire broadcast industr,? said Gupta. He points out that for a lot of channels, the ratings still determine their ad rates. ?If the viewership data stops, many of the smaller channels and broadcast groups will be wiped out as they will have no currency to validate their rates. The bigger broadcast groups can still sail through and negotiate on deals on the basis of sheer clout.”
Gupta said that Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) needs to come up, and fast. “IBF needs to expedite the process and in the interim, mandate an auditor immediately. It could be Ernst & Young or PricewaterhouseCoopers. But it is urgent.”
Arvind Sharma, chairman of Leo Burnett and president, Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) stressed that the ratings are an industry matter and should be tackled by the representative bodies of ad agencies, broadcasters and advertisers. It was the responsibility of the industry stakeholders to come up with solutions, he said.
But the NBA reiterated its stand on the letter. Barun Das, chief executive of Zee News and vice-president, NBA said that their interests were aligned with the IBF. He doesn’t see any issue in asking the government’s aid in resolving the matter. “As Soni says, the government is one of the largest broadcasters and one of the single largest advertisers in the country. And I see her point,” says Das.
I Venkat, director of Eenadu Group also defended the NBA’s decision. “It’s the only way we will arrive at a conclusion on this,? he said. Venkat is of the opinion that the industry stakeholders are too deeply entrenched in the matter, to take a dispassionate view of the ratings system. Each looks at the ratings issue from his own spectrum.
“They (ISA, IBF and AAAI) have been trying to get BARC on its feet for many years now. But in vain. It was a similar situation many years back, when Zee had drawn attention to the fact that the list of panel homes was not confidential, exposing some of the loopholes in the ratings system. The industry stakeholders then said that they will take stringent measures- measures which were never implemented,” said Venkat.
He added that news broadcasters have their own specific set of concerns. Big events take place in the news world, without the news channels registering an increase in ratings. It is not surprising that they seek solutions, as per him.
Other news broadcasters say that they don’t care which body resolves the matter, as long as there is light at the end of the tunnel.
“I am sure that at the end of it all, we all (industry and researchers) together will win and we will have a controversy-free audience measurement system which allows our business to grow smoothly,” said Neeraj Sanan, chief marketing officer, MCCS which runs ABP News (formerly called Star News.)
Uday Shankar, president IBF and chief executive of Star India remained unavailable for comment, till the time of filing the story.
