TV ratings: Ensuring adherence to international best practice
Tuesday, 25 November 2014 00:38
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The inaugural meeting of the Television Audience Measurement Advisory Committee (TAMAC) was held recently at the Cinnamon Grand with participation by TV networks, ad agencies and advertisers. Lanka Market Research Bureau Ltd. (LMRB), the operator of the RapidMeter system for TV audience measurement in Sri Lanka, acted as the facilitator.
The current TAMAC membership comprises the following: Ravindra De Coonghe (Marketing Director – GlaxoSmithKline), Peter Solomon (Director Media Planning – Grants), Sabry Haniz (Chief Operating Officer – GroupM), Upali Ranjith (Director General Marketing – ITN), Prashanth Subramanium (Director – Media Factory), Radhini de Costa (Assistant Vice-President Marketing Services – Nestle), Lalith Sumanasiri (Managing Director- Ogilvy Media, Neo@Ogilvy) and Siddharth Banerjee (Country Marketing Director – Unilever).
More representatives from TV networks and advertisers (and possibly academia) are expected to join TAMAC in the near future.
LMRB emphasised that with the growing complexities in TV audience measurement, the need for delivering trust, confidence and integrity with the data becomes critical. Therefore the highest ethical and professional standards have to be followed when running a system such as the RapidMeter, for measuring TV audiences in a country.
The role of TAMAC would be to ensure adherence to international best practice in sample design, selection and recruitment, response rates, data processing, ratings calculations and the elimination of third party interference. TAMAC would also act as a forum for addressing user concerns.
During the meeting, it was explained that the ratings provider supplied viewership data along with the software necessary for its analysis, leaving users free to analyse the data and arrive at various results, whether it be a channel ranking or anything else.
It is therefore clear that the TV audience measurement system does not produce one and only one rating. Rather, each report contains millions of numbers, organised by demographic groups, TV channels, TV programs and time periods. Each of the ratings obtained from the data has its own margin of error because of its unique characteristics.
A rise or drop in viewership for a program need not necessarily mean that TV viewers have suddenly started liking or disliking content. Analysing TV viewing behaviour is more complex. There are many factors at play. Environmental factors like political events, adverse weather conditions such as lightening, power cuts, competitive programs, effect of promotions, special events like cricket etc. all contribute to behavioural (and therefore) data changes. These must be studied carefully before reaching any conclusions.
The meeting concluded, with general agreement that the whole ratings exercise was a learning curve, with users understanding over time that the biggest drivers of ratings was the content of programs and the profile of audiences.
