Family Wars For TV Remote… and TRP Jhol!

The festival buying season is here in India. Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, etc. are on an overdrive mode to woo the consumer. Courtesy the pandemic, the retail sector, like most other sectors, has been hit hard. Everyone is bleeding due to the consumer wariness to and spend. Every product whose purchase can be postponed has been done so by the consumer. Spends on advertising have been cut drastically. Coming after a prolonged economic depression, this has been the last straw for many brands and companies.

A perfect time for TRP jhol (scam) to happen!

Such things have happened before too. For a person who has witnessed the emergence of TV advertising for over three decades, this incident does not surprise me. Most stakeholders question the numbers but no one tries to fix it or find an alternative. Life goes on. Guess advertisers and their ‘expert’ media buyers have chosen to coexist with it as both have their skin in the game.

It has been a triple whammy for print media. Less physical circulation, receding advertising demand and a higher acceptance of online news. Of over 50,000 registered publications, not over 1% make profits without government advertising support during normal times. In pandemic time, the number will be much less. Struggle have always been a middle name for smaller publications. The pandemic has hastened their extinction!

The TV medium shows a similar pattern. There are over 1000 TV channels and the clutter is killing the advertising planners. Similar to print medium, there are few big channels followed by long tail of smaller ones. Except TRP, there is little else available to measure their channel viewership.

Television Rating Point (TRP) is a tool to ‘measure’ the viewership for programmes. People’s Meters are installed in some houses as a representative sample of the TV viewing universe. It records the time and the programme that a viewer watches on a particular day. Then the average is taken for a 30-day period which gives viewership of a particular channel. Specific programmes (and therefore the TV channels) get rated in this process. The process answers fewer questions than it raises.  

In the current pandemic scenario, everyone wants to put its best foot forward during the buying season. Everyone knows that this window of opportunity will last for no more than   6 weeks. The same logic is followed by Television channels and they have brought their best programmes on air during this time - Bigg Boss, KBC, IPL, etc.

Small General Entertainment Channels (GEC) and the News channels have never had a healthy TRP. In an era of OTT channels and lockdowns, fudging the TRP data seems their easiest option to survive.

No doubt that it is illegal and am not supporting it any bit. But for some channels, the choice between playing with viewership numbers and selling one’s soul to a particular political ideology is like a choice between devil and deep-sea.

Sushil Bahal is Managing Director of Raka Reputation Management Services Pvt. Ltd., a 20-year old, Mumbai based PR and Advertising company offering integrated communication solutions and maximum reach across 83 top media regions across India. Raka Reputation has experience across sectors, particularly Banking, Financial Services, Healthcare, Hospitality, Education, Lifestyle, Manufacturing, Technology, etc. Raka Reputation has been associated as a communications partner to some of the most complex challenges and nearly 250 IPOs.

Please visit our websites www.rakareputation.com or www.rakapronline.com for any further information. Sushil can be contacted on [email protected].