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A tweet from Punit Goenka, CEO, Zee Entertainment Enterprises, said it all. The launch of Broadcast Audience Research Council’s television audience measurement system was termed a historic occasion.
“With the implementation of @BARCIndia, the ecosystem has certainly turned absolutely transparent. @BARCIndia will certainly be the best solution to report what the nation is actually watching,” Goenka tweeted.
Monitoring and measurement of content consumption is set to change for the better, as BARC India rolls out its first set of data. In the new system, television viewership will no longer be reported on the old socio-economic classification system (SEC).
A New Consumer Classification System (NCCS) has been instituted, which would ensure that the number of TV viewing households surveyed increases to 20,000, and further to around 50,000 over the next four years.
Partho Dasgupta, CEO, BARC India, said his team was proud to create the world’s largest and future-ready television audience measurement service.
BARC historyThe Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF), the Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA) and Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) had formally launched BARC in 2012, with the IBF holding 60 per cent stake, and ISA and AAAI 20 per cent each in the official body.
Similar to BARB (the UK-based Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board), BARC will commission independent specialist research vendors to conduct audience measurement.
In a statement, Goenka noted that what countries across the world take at least five years to roll out, the IBF, the AAAI and ISA have managed in two years.
Terming it the most challenging service governed by a single joint industry body for the entire country, he added that it was the uniqueness of cultural and media consumption diversity of India that made the job so tough.
Initially, BARC will be releasing data for over one lakh cable and satellite markets, which correspond to a sample size of 10,760 households. BARC will monitor 12,000 sample households for this, using a stratified random sampling technique.
This will go up to 20,000 reporting homes with the addition of rural areas, in order to represent ‘What India Watches’.
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