NDTV vs. TAM Case

In case you didn't notice, the entire TV and advertising worlds, their aunts, cousins and dogs, are up in arms over the NDTV Group's $1.3 billion lawsuit-grenade that has landed right in the center of their incestuous world. From advertisers to TV channels to media buyers, everybody is taking part in the newspaper column equivalent of the candlelight solidarity march.

"Of course, we've known this for years now."

"TAM data is utterly corrupted."

"Just 8000-odd homes cannot represent India."

It is as if every single person in the Rs.13,000 crore TV advertising kingdom woke up one fine day and decided to follow NDTV's lead and publicly denounce their undisputed king for over a decade, TAM.

Except in this case, it is not just the emperor who was naked.

It is instead the entire kingdom.

To understand why, consider these criticisms of TAM data.

"It is clearly emerging that we were provided research data that was questionable," said the CEO of Zee Networks.

"TAM CEO L.V Krishnan is a shattered man today. The credibility of the EU 4 billion Dutch information company VNU (via AC Nielsen) is now at stake."

"This is scandalous. It shows programmes are being rated with fudged figures and agencies merrily signing new contracts worth lakhs. The guilty should not go scot-free. But now that the rot has been noticed, hopefully things will be better in the future," said the CEO of Sony Entertainment TV.

Did I mention that all of them are over a decade old?

That's right. Those comments were in reaction to the sensational leak of TAM's "confidential" list of the homes it monitored in Mumbai for just a few thousand rupees in 2001.

What happened at the end of that sordid episode?

Well, the Indian Broadcasting Federation Foundation (IBF) set up a committee, that wonderful gift the British left us, to investigate the matter.

While their counterparts at the Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA) and Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) went much further, saying "the current model used to measure TV viewership or TRPs is one of the best in the world, and that the sanctity of the data had not been tampered with. It therefore remains the best system available to evaluate television viewership."

That TAM not only emerged unscathed from that crisis but went on to crush newer and technologically superior competitors like aMap along the way is a reflection on the doublespeak that exists within the industry.

We've compiled some of the best examples of this over the last week:

1. The TAM system can be easily gamed, thanks to corrupt field staff and small panel sizes

So who are the ones doing the actual, corrupting? Media advertising space is widely regarded to be one of the most opaque, mismanaged and corruptible sectors run by professionals and multinational companies. Ad agencies think nothing of taking kickbacks from media houses in return for delivering their client's ad budgets. Advertisers willingly shut their eyes to that as long as it saves them a few percentage points from their ad budgets, objectivity and transparency be damned.

2. The poor quality of TAM research is because Nielsen and Kantar (who together own TAM) refuse to infuse additional funds into India

While not defending TAM, this reeks of double-standards. TAM, like every single TV channel, ad agency or advertiser, is a profit-seeking company. It will do everything in its power to maintain or increase profit levels, including by cutting costs.

So if you agree with NDTV that TAM ought to increase its panel size from 8150 to 30,000, do keep your cheque books ready to pay an appropriately higher fee to cover the increase in costs.

3. Everybody's saying "I knew it" and "I told you so"

"I have always been saying that the TAM data is all wrong, fudged," says Subhash Chandra, the founder and chairman of Essel Group which owns the Zee group of channels.

In 2001, it was the very same Zee group then headed by Sandeep Goyal that spearheaded an attack on TAM after claiming that its panel database was available for just a few thousand rupees, allowing literally anyone to game the system.

So why then did it take 11 years to raise the same allegations? It's a question that industry stalwarts like Chandra should also ponder over.

4. Broadcasters blaming advertisers and ad agencies for letting it come to this

"It is very frustrating that the AAAI and ISA are holding BARC behind," says Star India CEO and President of the IBF, Uday Shankar.

The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) is (or was, depending on how cynical you want to be) a joint industry body comprised of broadcasters, advertisers and ad agencies to oversee and manage TV audience research in India. First mooted in 2007, it has yet to become operational.

Meanwhile, almost comically, AAAI and ISA say that the BARC was their idea and that the ball is currently in IBF's court.

5. Everybody just wants better data

Sure, just ask the News Broadcasters Association (NBA), which in September last year asked TAM to reduce the frequency of its audience monitoring data from weekly to monthly.

No wonder poor aMap, the ill-fated competitor to TAM which actually thought that with better technology (its monitoring system didn't require field visits) and frequency (daily instead of weekly), stood no chance at all. Because transparency and speed isn't what everyone wants.

6. TAM is woefully compromised because it is co-owned by WPP, which owns the largest ad and media buying agencies around.

This is particularly rich. Because much of the corruption at the field level for TAM happens with the assistance of local cable operators. I've heard multiple accounts of a media house that also owns a cable network (there are multiple) bribing TAM households with "free" flatscreen TVs in return for keeping their channels tuned in.

If the WPP group should be viewed with suspicion for its conflicts of interest, so should all media companies that have explicit or implicit ownership in cable and satellite distribution too.

7. Expanding TAM panels is prohibitively expensive

The way TAM conducts its research is so outdated, it borders on a joke. Outdated box-like instruments are connected to TVs inside panel households, each with its own remote which must be used by residents instead of better designed ones they probably own.

The data that is collected on their viewing habits is stored in the box and must be manually retrieved on a weekly basis by TAM's field staff. It is then transported to TAM's offices to be collated and published.

This is a horribly dated and expensive way to conduct research today.

Much of the expense and delays caused by manual collection of data can be done away with if the people meters can automatically upload data via a mobile data connection.

In fact that is exactly what aMap did. Not that it found much favour with TAM customers.

Regardless of aMap's failure, it should be possible to devise better people meter devices and data retrieval mechanisms so that a 100 percent increase in panel size doesn't necessarily have to imply a 100 percent increase in costs and fees.

8. TAM's sample size is too small for India.

The most common statistic that's trotted out to question TAM data is the apparently small size of its 8150 homes to measure 130 million homes with cable or satellite TV.

It's a wrong charge, because TAM does not purport to measure TV viewing across all of India, but only in "Class 1? towns and cities, i.e. those with a population above 1 lac. There are 162 of these currently.  (Rural towns are measured only for Maharashtra)

Of course there exists a case for increasing the panel size (the USA has 20,000 for 114 million TV households while UK has 5,100 for 26 million), but that is something TAM seemed to have already planned for.

9. Seeking the intervention of the government in TAM

One of the main points of the NDTV lawsuit is how politicians and political parties are behind-the-scenes owners of Indian TV broadcasting and distribution. NDTV estimates that nearly one-third of all news channels and close to two-thirds of all cable operators are owned by politicians or their parties.

Given that, and the dismal history of impartial regulation in India especially in recent years, you'd think it wasn't a great idea to welcome politicians into the TAM fiasco.

But then, cutting your own nose to spite your face seems to be a rather common activity for the sector.