The Hindu Business Line : Mapping fortunes?

A new rating system for television programmes, aMap, creates a stir as the industry is unsure of how this competitor of TAM will affect it. Catalyst does an industry check.

IT'S just a fraction of the Rs 4,500-crore television media market that it services. It doesn't provide glamorous content but churns out down-to-earth numbers. And it's no longer a single-player market but now totals two, with the recent entry of the Ahmedabad-based Audience Measurement & Analytics. Of course, it's the television ratings market, which in recent times has been synonymous with TAM.

Generally, competition is fine but not at the cost of order. TAM's stint as a single player had provided order in an industry that had earlier witnessed confusion in a competitive market. TAM and INTAM finally merged, relieving the industry of contrasting sets of data.

But now that there's one more player which wants to deliver viewership numbers and make sense of those, industry players see themselves dealing with contrasting numbers in the near future.

According to Premjeet Sodhi, Head, Intellect, Lintas Media Services-Research & Technologies, conflict will always come in along with competition. But he "hopes the conflict converts into a healthy debate at the industry level and gives direction to the measurement agencies to deliver a better product."

Jasmin Sohrabji, President, MediaCom, says differences in results are "a likely possibility," what with the differences in sample sizes, markets and sampling techniques, among others.

Audience Measurement & Analytics, whose aMap will capture and present data electronically through the GSM mode on a daily basis, has indicated that it is planning to install at least 10,000 peoplemeters in two years — that's more than double of what TAM has now.

Lodestar's National Media Director Nandini Dias reckons that "two methods of data collection can never give identical results. But what is worse is channels, clients and some agencies too will shift from one database to the other depending on what suits them at that point of time." This is what Sohrabji fears will lead to "an each-to-its own decision-making."

So can the industry afford to support two players? Media planners seem to prefer a single-player market. Says Sohrabji: "The industry cannot support two systems. We've all been through this in the past with TAM and INTAM, and we users paid the price — in more ways than one. We need one system ... one effective and efficient system."

Ashutosh Srivastava, Managing Director of MindShare India says, "It's ridiculous to waste limited resources subscribing to two databases."

Broadcasters, however, don't seem to mind competition. Jaya TV's Vice-President (Marketing), K. Balaswaminathan, is all for a multi-player market, provided there's consistency in data reports. According to SET's Executive Vice-President Sunil Lulla: "Competition is useful to drive the best practices. And both can co-exist, if there are enough features in both services to make them complementary and competitive" — a view echoed by Sodhi, who says "it is up to the measurement agencies to come up with sustaining USPs that gives them both space."

So, is an online system of ratings, which delivers data daily, good enough for aMap to score above TAM? Say, a soap has an average television rating point of 5, what additional ammunition will a media planner have if he has information that its TRP for yesterday was 5.3? Probably not much use in the above instance but channels which want to gauge the viewership impact of new launches immediately rather than after a couple of weeks will find it handy, says Tapan Pai, CEO of Audience Measurement & Analytics. Also, spot buys of sports events could see a shift according to what the instant data indicates.

A TAM spokesman says going online is no big deal, it's just a matter of a different delivery mode; the more important issues are validation and providing insights, which is TAM's expertise.

Audience Measurement & Analytics is in discussions with the Big Four accounting firms — PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young and KPMG — and will rope in one of them later this year to validate its work, says Francis Howard, its Director. The company also says it will have a "70-member strong team" that will take care of analysis.

All said and done, the online mode of providing daily information has struck a chord with the industry. "Online reporting is certainly more desirable than weekly reporting. Recently, TAM started providing the Daily Spot Monitoring service, which has been a great boon for the monitoring departments. This data helps them set right any operational issues early; similarly if we have viewership data on a daily basis, one would be geared to respond to the `resulting viewership' with greater swiftness," says Lintas' Sodhi, and his thought isn't a stray one.

MindShare's Srivastava preference for instant information comes with a rider: "There is a trade-off between the price you pay for information like this versus the value you can derive out of it, and the users have to evaluate whether the price is worth the value."

Audience Measurement & Analytics is consciously adopting a low-price strategy to penetrate the market. The company is providing the service free for the first month alone — and that is to give users a feel of what aMap is all about; as of now, it has set up 1,000 peoplemeters in three centres (Delhi, Mumbai and Ahmedabad). From the second month onwards, Managing Director Raviratan Arora says, users could procure all licences for Rs 2 lakh a month. Industry sources say the annual cost, at present, for all licences works out to around Rs 50 lakh, which means aMap will cost just 50 per cent of that. This, however, will be just the initial price, adds Arora.

The offering's price apart, daily ratings may not be a defining feature. Says TBWA India's Vice-President (Media) Gopinath Menon, "Day-to-day ratings will not be a big advantage for the new player as this can be done on the TAM system also if the planner wants to."

Srivastava also dismisses suggestions that overnight ratings could help build sustainable competitive advantage as "a laughable proposition." He says: "Supply of ratings is commodity business — it will be a matter of time before all players adjust to the new rules of the game. The real game is in what you do with the information, which helps build competitive advantage." He reckons overnight ratings to be more useful to broadcasters in mature markets "where advertisers/agencies buy audiences and scheduling is done by channels." Not in India, though.

With that being the case, the advantage may rest with research capabilities. How about developing models that present SEC A1 and A2 data separately, asks Menon. Without such a facility, "I am forced to look at SEC A as a whole, and this becomes a handicap when we are looking at very premium products. Similarly, for other SECs."

Also, products which provide linkages in terms of consumption will be accepted even at a premium price, he says. For instance, "With the `Sesame' of NRS I can know the number of people who read The Hindu, consume Horlicks and stay in a three-bedroom flat. I cannot do the same with the TAM software as of now."

Atul Phadnis, Vice-President, TAM Media Research, is planning one such feature. "We now plan to start a concept called `Elite TAM,' which will target upscale audiences." The attempt is to segment the top class urban elite, which would help media planners avail themselves of a data as focused as the number of urban elite who own four-wheelers.

While the research offerings would certainly count, industry people have a more basic need — making the sample size more robust, as also the depth of geographic coverage. TAM has 4,800 peoplemeters spread across over 70 cities and towns. Its rival plans to roll out 10,000 meters, with at least 500 in big cities, in a couple of years. While TAM has the coverage, aMap promises a bigger sample size.

TBWA's Menon draws a parallel between print and television: both are worth Rs 4,500 crore each. But while the sample size is around 1,75,000 for print, it's below 5,000 for television, he says. He, however, agrees that the peoplemeter system is very expensive and it can't be increased suddenly without an adequate increase in the subscriber base.

Lodestar's Dias says: "More robust the database, lesser the margin of error. But we also understand that increasing the sample size is not too difficult. But as we increase the sample size the affordability factor decreases."

Although an increase in the sample size is comforting, "I do not know how many more will make the comfort level statistically significant," says Lintas' Sodhi.

Jaya TV's Balaswaminathan believes aMap can improvise and improve upon the deficiencies of the first mover.

But if competition ensures a similarity in service offerings, it will all boil down to the sample size. "The trick will be to see how both the systems report ratings for the same programme for a week. In case there is a major variance over a period of time, the larger sample size player will have an edge," says Menon.

To start with, though, big agencies are expected to subscribe to both. With aMap's rollout still a long way to go before completion, it's not yet time for industry players to look at choices. The real battle is yet to begin.

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