Broadcasters Should Be Accountable For Audience Delivery

Advertisers pay for audience when they buy ad time on television. But with TRPs varying widely, not just for live events such as cricket matches, but even for daily bread-andbutter programmes in soap operas, the cacophony of advertisers complaining about channels over-selling is rising. ET opens the debate on whether it’s time television channels started closely tying ad rates to their actual audience size and composition?

Red-herring coming from customers

Paritosh Joshi

WHERE DO audiences come from? Broadly, this question has a three-part response. First, audiences come from distribution. If a viewer cannot even access a channel on her cable network, the content might as well not exist for all the difference it makes to her life. Second, audiences come from marketing. Even if a channel is available in the great mashup that is the current analog cable bouquet, it is liable to get lost in a clutter of anywhere up to a hundred channels. No marketing, no trial. Third, and most importantly over the long haul, audiences come from content. Distribution gets it there. Marketing induces trial. Only great content creates the loyal viewer who sets appointments with it days, weeks, months, even years on end. Here then is the rhetorical question: Which of these three are NOT driven by broadcasters? In its brief decade-and-a-half existence, cable TV in India has already reached nearly a third of all homes. Television, by nature, is completely egalitarian and appeals as readily to the toddler in his crib as to his grandmother in her arm chair. It is no accident that India’s period of consumption driven GDP growth corresponds so closely to the cable & satellite TV revolution. With a track record of such success, how could any reasonable person raise any questions about the sustained responsibility that the broadcaster community has taken for audience delivery? The solitary question that remains is one that can only be posed by the tremendously myopic or the tremendously obtuse: demanding predictable audience behaviour at the granularity of an individual show or season or channel. And even that is trivial. As soon as the customer community believes that a show/channel/network is ‘not performing’ the release -orders (for placing ads) dry up anyway. How much can a typical broadcaster do under the circumstances? Demand performance of the customer’s contractual obligations? The accountability question is a red herring introduced by the customer community in an environment where broadcasters are finally waking up to their chronically under-monetised, underpriced real estate and contemplating a long overdue re-rating of prices. The writer is president (advertising sales & distribution), Star India .

Accountability exists, bring in transparency

Shashi Sinha

UNFORTUNATELY the debate on accountability is happening against the backdrop of (India’s) recent World Cup loss. Itmay be worthwhile to look at accountability in media buying and media deliveries from a larger perspective and divorced from the World Cup debacle. First a quick look at the evolving media scene – with more than 400 TV channels (and counting) the volume of advertising time available is comparable to the most developed countries in the world, yet the magnetisation of this advertising time remains low compared to the rest of the world, for a variety of reasons, the primary one being supply and demand. This has led to the advertising and media industry’s focus being on rates, so much so that in spite of cable & satellite homes going up from 40-million to 60-million in the last two years, most channels have not been able to exploit this increased delivery of audiences proportionately to their revenues.. Now addressing the issue of accountability in media buying, I strongly believe accountability just like in real life and in any relationship and transaction already exists though it may not be overtly stated. The real issue is bringing in a transparency and real time value to accountability. For this to happen we must resolve a couple of issues, the first being the measurement system. While we have a robust TV measurement system in place, a real time accountability matrix will require a conviction of all parties- broadcasters, agencies and clients on the measurement data as being the final word, which may require to be upgraded leading to big investments. However, the bigger hurdle is mindset of all parties involved – will a advertiser and a agency pay more if a programmed delivers an upside, conversely will the channel cover a downside. I personally believe accountability will be good for the industry as TV channels will focus more on programming that delivers while ad agencies will have to move away from rate negotiations and focus on delivering audiences, while clients will focus on delivering marketing propositions to these audiences instead of every member worried about the best rates. If wishes were horses…… The writer is CEO, Lodestar Universal

Courtesy: EconomicTimes
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