LMRB says overnight TV ratings to become a reality with industry support

Lanka Market Research Bureau Ltd. (LMRB) stated that it is now poised to bring in the latest technology to capture the rapidly changing TV viewership landscape in the island. LMRB has the distinction of being responsible for revolutionising TV audience measurement in Sri Lanka in 2004, by introducing the PeopleMeter system,

In a joint presentation with its UK parent Kantar held at The Kingsbury, Colombo, the Kantar-LMRB team described to a packed audience of business leaders and senior managers from TV stations and advertising agencies, how the new proposed digital meter would be able to capture both analog and digital signals from terrestrial as well as cable and satellite broadcasts with no theoretical limit to the number of channels that could be monitored.

Also, unlike the current system which uses frequency matching, the new meters would identify channels through audio-matching. To crown it all, with data being downloaded via GPRS, overnight TV ratings would become a real possibility.

Media planners, who according to Industry sources currently operate in an estimated Rs. 15 billion advertising market, depends heavily on LMRB TV ratings to advise clients on where to place their advertising money, while payments to stations by many large advertisers are often calculated and validated on a cost-per-rating-point (CPRP) basis.  

Therefore, a ‘next day’ minute-by-minute feedback on the size and composition of the audience, as envisaged through the use of the RapidMeter, would provide an opportunity for stations to make changes to the content and airtime of ongoing programs wherever this was possible. Similarly, advertisers and their agencies would have a chance to modify the timing and placement of their ads.

“We realise the responsibility placed on us by our stakeholders to sharpen our tools to measure media audiences,” said LMRB CEO Himalee Madurasinghe who began the proceedings. “Looking towards the future, Sri Lanka plans to change to digital broadcasting very soon. Satellite and cable television is penetrating faster than ever before and users are upgrading their TV sets from what they had used in the past to LCD to LED to 3D. With the rapid evolution in the technology and the fragmentation of the media, we have realised that the TV audience measurement system would also need to change to handle these complexities,” she added.

Keld Nielsen, Global Business Development Director of Kantar Media, went on to explain: “A PeopleMeter panel is continuous. It is in operation 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It therefore requires stringent quality control procedures, which are implemented using a suite of advanced software programs developed by Kantar. This software has an extensive fault management system, which examines the data from each home and applies automatic quality checks to ensure that the highest international quality standards are maintained.”

Continuing, he added: “The advent of digital TV has brought in a huge number of channels and made TV viewing more personalised, with time-shift viewing, viewing on the move etc., which requires a whole new approach to TV audience measurement.”

Pushkar Kulkarni, International Business Director Kantar Media, proceeded to give a detailed description of the workings of Kantar’s RapidMeter. “This meter uses the technique of audio-matching to recognise the TV channel,” he explained. “Each audio signature generated in the household PeopleMeter is compared to millions of reference audio signatures generated and collected in our reference sites.”

The new TV audience measurement system would cover the whole of Sri Lanka including the North, which hitherto had not been covered by earlier systems. The system would also be made ‘future proof’ to take in the changes taking place in the TV broadcast landscape.

In conclusion, LMRB invited all stakeholders to give their fullest corporation to make this important new venture a success.

Kantar Group UK, the holding company of LMRB, is engaged in providing insight and consultancy services in over 90 countries around the world, covering everything from innovation and new product development to optimisation of marketing spend and measurement of TV audiences. Kantar clients include most of the FTSE and Fortune 100 companies.

Kantar Media is present in over 60 countries servicing over 22,000 clients with a pool of over 4,500 experts. Recently, Kantar was involved in setting-up the world’s largest PeopleMeter panel of 35,000 meters, in China’s complex market, where 60,000 new TV commercials are registered every day and 3,100 channels need to be monitored.