In the light of the recent developments, the BARC Board has proposed starting with the ‘News Genre’. BARC will cease publishing the weekly individual ratings for all news channels. This exercise is expected to take ‪around 8-12 weeks and during this time the technical committee at BARC will review and augment the current standards of measuring and reporting the data of niche genres, to improve their statistical robustness and to significantly hamper the potential attempts of infiltrating the panel homes. This exercise would cover all Hindi, Regional, English News and Business News channels with immediate effect.

Around this time, however, BARC will continue to release weekly audience estimates for the genre of news by state and language.

Explaining the need for this move, Punit Goenka, Chairman of BARC India Board said, “Given the most recent developments, the BARC Board was of the opinion that a pause was necessitated to enable the industry and BARC to work closely to review its already stringent protocols and further augment them to enable the industry to focus on collaborating for growth and well-natured competitiveness”.

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Says Sunil Lulla, CEO, BARC India, “We at BARC take our role in truthfully and faithfully reporting ‘What India Watches’ with the greatest sense of responsibility and work with integrity to ensure that our audience estimates (ratings) remain true to their purpose”. He added, “besides augmenting current protocols and benchmarking them with global standards, BARC is actively exploring several options to discourage unlawful inducement of its panel home viewers and further strengthening its Code of Conduct to Address Viewership Malpractice”.

Now, individual news channels won’t get the weekly BARC data that they used to. But in the benefit of the advertisers, it will be known which genre is doing well.

Withholding of ratings will lead to non–availability of the various viewership variables for impacted channels. These variables include impressions, Daily reach, Average Time Spent (ATS), Cumulative reach, Rating percent.

What will this mean for advertisers? Ashish Bhasin, CEO APAC and Chairman India, Dentsu says, “The timing of this is unfortunate since it is around the festival. But it is important to build as much robustness in the currency as possible. It is a necessary move.”

Another source on the condition of anonymity from a large media agency stated that there won’t be much impact on the media planning and buying as most of the planning around festive season is already done and marketing plans are very much in place.

According to Shashi Sinha, CEO of IPG Media Brands, 8 weeks is a short time in the life of an ad campaign or rating mechanism. “ A lot of news is bought on the trend line. Not getting weekly individual data won’t make a huge difference.”

Another top-level source from a large media agency said, “I don’t think marketers will get out of the news genre completely. We not only look at TRP but different parameters. In the past too, the ratings were not available. That was the time when we looked at the reach, affinity, times-spent, etc. On the condition of anonymity, this source also added how this move will also give some time for news channels to realign and rethink.

Anupriya Acharya, CEO, Publicis Groupe South Asia too feels that BARC temporarily hitting the pause button on the ratings of news channels should be viewed as a positive step because it helps both BARC and the industry reflect, take stock and bring in corrective action if and as needed. “It should also help in removing any apprehensions that various parties may have.

As for any impact on the genre, since it is a temporary suspension of ratings for some weeks, we do not expect much adverse impact. The news genre overall has been doing very well in terms of viewer interest, especially in the Covid-19 environment.”

(Edited by : Abhishek Jha)

First Published:Oct 15, 2020 3:15 PM IST