TRP and its manipulation "EMPOWER IAS"

Context:

• The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC India) recently said its efforts on “combating infiltration” were focused on the individual(s) responsible for manipulating the TRP system.

 

More on the news:

• Over the past several days, there have been various news reports as regards to fraud Television Ratings and BARC India.
• The council has issued a statement saying it was providing the necessary assistance to the ongoing investigation by the law enforcement agency.

 

About TRPs (Target Rating Points) 

• About: The TRP is the metric used by the marketing and advertising agencies to evaluate viewership.
• Viewer: Anyone who watches television for more than a minute is considered a viewer.
• It represents how many people, from which socio-economic categories, watched which channels for how much time during a particular period. This period is one minute as per the international standards.

 

Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC)

• It is a company created in 2010 and jointly owned by advertisers, ad agencies, and broadcasting companies, represented by the Indian Society of Advertisers, the Indian Broadcasting Foundation and the Advertising Agencies Association of India.
• The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting notified the Policy Guidelines for Television Rating Agencies in India on January 10, 2014, and registered BARC in July 2015 under these guidelines, to carry out television ratings in India.

 

Methodology of Calculation:

•  
• Bar-o-meters: BARC has installed Bar-O-meters in over 45,000 empanelled households. These record viewing details as well as audio watermarks of content.
• Audio watermarks are embedded in video content prior to broadcast. These watermarks are not audible to the human ear, but can easily be detected and decoded using dedicated hardware and software.
• Selection of Households: The households are chosen by an annual Establishment Survey which is a large-scale face-to-face survey of a sample of approximately 3 lakh households from the target population.
• The panel chosen to capture TRPs must be representative of the country’s population, and the methodology must be economically viable for the industry.
• Classification of Households: These households are classified into 12 categories under the New Consumer Classification System (NCCS) adopted by BARC in 2015, based on the education level of the main wage earner and the ownership of consumer durables from a list of 11 items ranging from a power connection to a car.
• Data Collection: While watching a show, members of the household register their presence by pressing their separate viewer ID button.
• This captures the duration for which the channel was watched and by whom and provides data on viewership habits across age and socio-economic groups.

 

How can TRP data be rigged?

• If broadcasters can find the households where devices are installed, they can either bribe them to watch their channels, or ask cable operators or multi-system operators to ensure their channel is available as the “landing page” when the TV is switched on.
• For TRPs, it does not matter what the entire country is watching, but essentially what the 45,000-odd households supposed to represent TV viewership of the country have watched. Broadcasters can target these households to fudge actual viewership data.
• In the 2018 consultation paper, TRAI has mentioned “One of the biggest challenges has been the absence of any specific law through which the agents/ suspects involved in panel tampering/infiltration could be penalised”. It noted that BARC “has filed FIRs in various police stations against the agents/ suspects involved in panel tampering/infiltration” but its efforts “to mitigate panel tampering/ infiltration have been hampered due to absence of any legal framework”.

 

Precautions to Prevent Rigging:

•  
• The viewing behaviour of panel homes is reported to BARC India directly and daily.
• Coincidental checks either physically or telephonically are done regularly. Certain suspicious outliers are also checked directly by BARC India.
• These households rotate randomly every year and they are kept confidential.

 

Panel Tampering and TRP:

• TRAI mentioned “panel infiltration has a significant impact when the panel size is smaller” and “with the increase in panel size, infiltration of panel homes becomes challenging”.
• Each channel tries to project itself as a market leader in a particular segment, it slices the data into socio-economic brackets on the basis of NCCS, age, gender, time slots (primetime) etc to find the perfect data slice. This too increases relative error in the data, because of the small sample size.
• In the example of English TV news, which has a small share of the national viewership pie at around 1.5%, which means that for around 45,000 panel households, around 700 households will contribute to the viewership. “What actually happens is that while your sample is around 700, not all of them are watching English TV news every day. Actual watching will be around 350 homes”. In such a scenario, if one manages to rig 10 among the heavy viewing homes, then you can swing the needle big time. 

 

Why these ratings are important?

• On the basis of audience measurement data, ratings are assigned to various programmes on television.
• Television ratings in turn influence programmes produced for the viewers.
• Better ratings would promote a programme while poor ratings will discourage a programme.
• Incorrect ratings will lead to production of programmes which may not be really popular while good programmes may be left out.
• Besides, TRPs are the main currency for advertisers to decide which channel to advertise on by calculating the cost-per-rating-point (CPRP).

 

Limitations of TRP:

•  
• The panel can be infiltrated or tampered by bribing viewers or cable operators or tampering with the selection of panel.
• If the sample size is very small, e.g. for English News channels, the manipulation becomes easier as even manipulating a few homes will change the TRP.
• There is an absence of any specific law through which the agents/suspects involved in panel tampering/infiltration could be penalised.
• About 70% of the revenue for television channels comes from advertising and only 30% from the subscription. Dependence on advertisements for revenue is leading to broadcasting content which suits the advertisers.