TRPs (television rating points): India
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What are TRPs (television rating points)?
From: October 11, 2020: The Times of India
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The importance of TRPs
As in 2020
_in_2020.jpg)
From: October 11, 2020: The Times of India
See graphic:
TRPs (television rating points) in 2020
The vulnerabilities of the system, as in 2020
TRPs: Built On Houses Of Cards?, October 12, 2020: The Times of India
The entire TRP system that underpins over ₹25,000 crore worth of TV advertising is riddled with serious vulnerabilities and challenges: A tiny and skewed sample of 44,000 homes for a viewership of 84 crore, outdated survey data, regulatory changes – and, as the unfolding scandal has highlighted, scope for manipulation through bribery. Gaurav Laghate takes a close look
Television rating points are once again in the news after the Mumbai police claimed it had busted a racket involving manipulation of TRPs by unscrupulous channels to fraudulently boost viewership data and mislead advertisers.
The ongoing investigation has unearthed that five panel TV homes – households where meters are installed to capture viewership – were compromised to rig viewership of certain channels. That’s correct, just five homes.
What difference can five homes make in a country with a TV viewing universe of 836 million? The answer: A big one among smaller genres like English news, niche categories like infotainment, and even some regional channels.
Take the example of Mumbai, the financial capital of the country. The city has over 2,000 bar-o-meters installed by Broadcast Audience Research Council India, which is around 5% of the 44,000 meters that BARC claims to have installed across the country.
As per last week’s viewership of the English news genre, the average reach of all the English news channels put together was 0.4% in Mumbai, and the average time spent per channel was around 15 minutes for the entire week.
Effectively, just eight panel homes watched these channels in Mumbai last week, giving them a disproportionate weightage in ratings.
Here’s how.
Hypothetically, if one channel identifies even two homes with these bar-o-meters and pays them to watch one particular news channel for 2 hours, instead of 15 minutes, in a week, the average time spent on that channel will go up by a whopping 175% to over 41 minutes. As reach has remained the same, TRPs of the channel in Mumbai alone will also go up by 175%.
The other fundamental issue with TRPs is the mechanism. While every effort is said to be made to keep the list of panel homes confidential, the vulnerability lies in the human chain: A TV channel bribes a relationship manager in the research set-up, who then ‘incentivizes’ a few households to keep the channel switched on. “Rigging of 10-20 homes or even up to 50 homes will not have any impact on mass entertainment channels, but for smaller genres, ratings will widely swing in their favour,” said a top TV executive of a channel.
TOI spoke with multiple executives across TV channels and media agencies and most of them asked for anonymity to speak freely as the matter is too sensitive and their clients are directly involved.
Rig The Gig
Since the advent of the ratings system in India, channels have tried to use unscrupulous methods to manipulate ratings. While BARC’s role as a ratings agency is now under intense scrutiny, its predecessor, TAM, which was a joint venture between Nielsen and Kantar, was also criticised on similar grounds. Earlier in July, the News Broadcasters Association (NBA) had accused BARC of “conniving” with TV9’s Bharatvarsh, a Hindi news channel, to manipulate viewership.
Rajat Sharma, president of the NBA, told this correspondent that the events that have unfolded in the last few months and particularly the last three days, have clearly demonstrated that there are “weaknesses” in the rating system.
“BARC itself has acknowledged in its police complaints that metered homes are being manipulated. The investigation has exposed that panel homes were being compromised by certain channels. It has been done with the help of ex-employees who are familiar with the system and aware of which homes have meters,” said Sharma, who is also chairman of India TV.
Corrupted data, Sharma added, is creating a false narrative on ‘what India watches’ and is putting pressure on newsrooms to make editorial decisions that are distorted and based on inaccurate information.
Industry mavens say broadcasters themselves will have to stop the practice. “There is no vaccination against this manmade problem,” said the CEO of an ad agency. “All stakeholders have to understand that TV measurement is an industry service and the people who created the service should abide by a set of ethics.”
An email query sent to BARC India remained unanswered till the time of going to press. A senior TV executive said that if people are intent on beating the system by unethical practices, there is no foolproof solution against such frauds. “There are numerous statistical forensic methods used continuously by the system. But one has to understand that between 44,000 meters, the system is generating data points for every individual every 8 seconds. The quality control algorithms check data points randomly, and will not keep checking the same household,” he explained.
Big Returns On ‘Investment’
TV channels, especially those that are free-to-air (FTA), are dependent on advertising revenues. For them, spending a few lakhs on tampering with viewership data could yield big gains. “The upside is too big to not take such risks, which is why many channels keep doing this, instead of spending money on quality content,” said the distribution head of a TV channel.
BARC India uses third-party vendors for installation, maintenance, and operation of bar-o-meters at panel homes. For this, it pays between Rs 150-Rs 750 per month to these panel homes. Which makes it challenging to get higher socio-economic classes to allow these meters to be installed in their homes. In effect, it leaves the top 2.5% of Indian viewers out of the viewership measurement system. “There is no motivation for most of the higher economic classes to allow bar-ometers in their homes. Thus the entire ratings are coming from ‘economically weaker’ households, who are easy to target. It’s like elections, where people cast their votes in favour of one candidate for money,” said the business head of a channel. BARC has been working on mitigating these risks. In April 2017, it set up a six-member independent disciplinary committee headed by Justice (retired) Mukul Mudgal to investigate and address complaints of viewership malpractices and tampering of its measurement system. In the next 28 months, the council referred 18 cases to the committee with evidence of malpractices.
“The issue is that BARC complains but police doesn’t lodge FIRs in many smaller cities,” said a person closely associated with BARC. “They think it is a frivolous thing to charge people for accepting money to watch more TV. Any attempts at rigging data need to be punishable under the law.”
Vicious Cycle
The entire consumer classification system, or NCCS, based on the chief wage earner’s education and number of “consumer durables” (from a pre-defined list) owned by the family, is outdated, say media industry insiders. What’s more, it is based on a 2017 survey, after which a lot has changed in the TV universe thanks to sector regulator Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)’s new tariff order (NTO). Post implementation of NTO, consumers can select only the channels they want to watch at the MRP of each.
“Does it actually represent India’s TV viewing universe? The answer is no. The sample is extrapolated on the basis of an old establishment survey, which was done two and half years ago. It doesn’t reflect the dynamic situation on the ground,” said a TV research executive. “It predates NTO, which represented a tectonic shift in the distribution space. By gut feel we know that the TV universe has shrunk and many people have moved from cable TV to DTH. A lot of these shifts aren’t captured.”
Then there's the issue of sample size. Even at 44,000 meters, many in the industry feel that the sample is inadequate and there’s need for more boxes to diminish relative error in viewership. Ultimately, TV executives say it is a vicious circle that is going to affect the entire industry in the long term, which might see advertisers moving to digital platforms if not corrected immediately.
Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC)
2020, Oct: alleged manipulation of TRPs
With Mumbai police launching an investigation into the alleged manipulation of TRPs by three private news channels, the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), the key rating agency for TV broadcast networks, said that BARC ratings remained true to purpose and that the ratings agency is a “data science driven joint-industry body” that deals “only in facts and evidence”.
Even though the ratings agency acknowledged it is not “insulated from intrusion attempts”, BARC chief executive Sunil Lulla, in a statement to BARC subscribers said, “Despite over 44,000, and growing, metered households spread across the entire country, we recognise that BARC is not insulated from intrusion attempts by unscrupulous individuals through various forms of inducement. Hence, we have taken several steps to ensure that these attempts are quickly identified, and the homes are de-installed, removing their impact, if any, on audience estimates. We continue to strengthen our vigilance mechanism and also leverage data science rigorously ensuring the audience estimates robustly reflect actual viewership.”
He also said BARC India had authorised Meterology Data Pvt. Ltd. (MDL), its subsidiary which “functions at arm’s length”, to undertake panel home operations through its authorised vendors, one of who is Hansa Market Research Private Limited, the complainant in the FIR filed in Mumbai.
With growing concerns that manipulated TRPs not only affect channels’ valuation, but also impact advertising spends by governments and businesses, the ratings agency also sought to clarify that it was BARC’s vigilance team that reported that five BARC India panel homes, serviced by Hansa, were showing some abnormality. “As is the protocol, Hansa was advised to investigate further. The Hansa audit showed that the said employee was suspected to be involved in tampering and influencing the panel household members-…Basis the information provided by Hansa, Mumbai police registered a FIR dated October 6...,” the BARC statement said.
The agency said the suspected homes have been removed from reporting and added that BARC has “strictly followed our established vigilance and disciplinary committee guidelines to deal with such isolated attempts”. “In spite of what may get reported or opined in the press, our governance continues to be robust and all of us at BARC continue to be driven by only one goal: to generate ratings that you rely on which are deeply rooted in science, free of any bias and truly reflect ‘What India Watches’.”
