From the stage of our industry, how do you help business grow with measurement? When they meet clients, a lot of youngsters come back with the observation that the client does not understand. But the reverse is also true. In agencies, too, there are people who don’t understand CMO (chief marketing officer) issues. The CMO is also being challenged in-house by the CFO. So, wherever you can quantify and give a better metrics of performance, the CMO can justify his marketing spends better. At the end of the day, media measurement is aiding the CMO, who is our client.

Our country is synonymous with heterogeneity, so many languages, such diverse behaviour by consumers, and so on. Hence, measurement becomes a big challenge. However, there are many things happening in parallel perhaps for the first time in Indian marketing history. In television measurement with several stakeholders we have successfully rolled out the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) with 25,000 meters, which will go up to 50,000 meters over the next two years. We have both BARC and ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulations) working on digital measurement of television and print media, respectively.

In television measurement, with BARC, the rural audience measurement has been the big benefit and has become a currency. The free dish has become a big phenomenon and broadcasters are changing their strategy. Three years ago, companies made only urban media plans and there was a massive spillover. Today, we see urban and rural planning and the growth for most FMCG companies is coming from rural India. There is also audio watermarking (my favourite) that needs to be exploited wholeheartedly to capture data in a more accurate way.

The big push that’s needed is in digital measurement. By next September, we will see the integration of television and digital measurement.

Finally it’s for the broadcasters to realise that digital is inevitable and therefore have a common currency to measure both media. There will be some pain in the short term when we see two different metrics coming together.

Pooling data Panels cannot ever give you the perfect picture in a country as big as India because of fragmentation. That’s why we have to take the help of big data. When all the over-the-top (OTT) players agree to share their big data, it will make the future interesting. It’s about the mindset which says ‘I am going to share from my data pool for the betterment of the industry.’

In the Indian Readership Survey (IRS), there has been an expansion of the sample size, weeding out of some existing samples. Also, the Media Research Users Council (MRUC) is talking about multimedia evaluation. Think about it, from one platform there are so many things happening in India simultaneously.

Can you imaging that a legacy body like the ABC which was into calculating circulation, is now ABC digital. Already some of the big publishing groups are tagging their sites and there is big data at play here.

Finally, from a marketer’s viewpoint, one can look forward to managing single source data. That will ensure that the CMO is more empowered to take the right decisions and he can then talk with more confidence about the data internally.

While this may be a long way to go, in the interim, I propose something that could be called the “single view of the truth.” One could pick up multiple sets of data points and use data fusion to get going. I know that not everybody believes in data fusion, but the stakeholders have to take the lead in making this happen.

The other thing is about using a common currency of measurement. India is among the few countries that uses cost per rating point (CPRP) in the television media. Almost all major countries use cost per thousand (CPT). The buyer-seller relationship is independent of a metric. India is an under-penetrated country. As penetration improves, efficiency will kick in further. I know that the industry has been speaking about it for some time. This is the time to see it in action. I am not saying that because of a new baseline, the cost of media will suddenly increase. Also, we need to understand research better. Numbers are indicators. They are not about the specifics.

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