INDIA SPECIAL ISSUE

CESP has audited the deployment of the Indian TV Audience measurement, one of the largest panels in the world. CESP is proud to share this experience with its media community.

Enjoy your reading,

Valérie Morrisson & Olivier Daufresne

Since 1997, CESP has been involved in auditing and consultancy in more than 20 countries. Each mission abroad has raised new issues due to local market specificities. Over the last two years, CESP has supported the deployment of TV Audience Measurement in India, and advised BARC on media measurement best practices.

In India, the panel size is 30 000 households, whereas in other CESP audited countries, the panel size is between 800 and 5 000 households.

Firstly, CESP worked on the representativeness of the TV panel, which deployment is a crucial challenge in very large countries. Once the representativeness of the panel certified, CESP was entrusted to evaluate the panel management, regarding the Indian local environment and specificities, such as the country area, the average household size…

Indeed, thanks to its international experience, CESP is convinced that the efficiency of a panel management has to be analyzed and monitored taking into account the regional issues. To do so, CESP compared the Indian situation with 10 other countries, and shared actionable recommendations, based on what was done in countries with similar challenges.

The specific situation in India

Indian TV Audience Measurement governance: strong local team and technical partnership

India chose a particular organization. BARC India is an advertising and media industry sponsored Joint Industry Committee responsible for TV Audience Measurement in India.
Instead of delegating the TV audience measurement system to a specific operator, such as Kantar Media, Nielsen or GfK, India has opted for a hybrid way to manage the system, combining a strong BARC local team and international support with Nielsen expertise for the Establishment Survey, Mediametrie peoplemeter technology and a software deployed by Markdata, a Portuguese media measurement company.

Measuring in a country of more than 836 Million people

As one of the largest countries in the world, in terms of population and country size, India had to face the crucial implementation challenge of a robust and representative panel. 300.000 interviews per year are conducted for the Establishment Survey and the panel was composed with 26.000 households at first and then, 33.000 households.
The new objective is 60.000 households. They represent 197 Million TV households and 836 Million individual TV viewers aged 2+ distributed in 3 287 259 km².
It is definitively the largest TV audience measurement panel audited by CESP in the world.

Big challenges and high quality

Representativeness

CESP Scientific Committee The testimonial of Anne-Marie Dussaix, Vice-President of the Scientific Committee.

“As a statistician, I was really impressed by the overall TV audience measurement system quality: the organization and the process deployed by BARC allow to ensure the representativeness of a TV audience measurement system at almost the scale of a continent.”

Representativeness was ensured firstly by a robust Establishment Survey, then through a satisfactory alignment of the panel structures with the theoretical panel objectives from the Establishment Survey. The Establishment Survey universe sources used come from official results, shared by the Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner. The large number of sampling points allows to cover the diversity of the Indian population. Then, all components of the panel design, from the recruitment to the weighting were satisfactory: reaching an efficiency coefficient of 89% after the neutralization of the defined urban population oversampling.

Panel management

Two main aspects of the panel management have impressed CESP: the large fieldwork team and the security procedure.

Regarding the fieldwork management, CESP was often asked to define an optimal number of field technicians. This optimal team is linked in particular to the size of the country and the level of necessary panel management. In India, a technician takes care of 78 installed households on average. This level is much higher than in the other panels audited by CESP. However, this extensive team of 360 technicians in September 2017 was necessary to manage efficiently a panel in such a large country.

In parallel, BARC put in place specific governance rules with the media industry players to avoid panellist corruption. Security is ensured by a dedicated of team of inspectors to track potential issues. To date, CESP identified a similarly high level of security only in 2 TV audience measurement systems audited in the last 5 years.

Solution customization

In 2017, BARC deployed a creative and integrated suite of software dedicated to panel management. This approach includes a geographic localization of the technician missions and a ticketing system to track the technician activity and secure the panellist database.

Next challenges

India still has some issues to deal with. The first one is the disconnection of TV peoplemeters when household members switch off the electric power. CESP well knows this challenge, as it exists in other countries in particular in the Middle East. Thanks to its international experience, CESP helped BARC to manage the electric connection issue.

Last but not least, CESP recommended BARC to increase the continuous tracking of the individual panellist compliance. It is crucial to conduct an ongoing coincidental survey in order to identify both household and individual participation, in particular when the household size is large. The larger the household is, the more the TV measurement operator has to pay attention to the participation of all family members.

Broadcast Audience Research Council
The testimonial of Romil Ramgarhia, Chief Operating Officer

« I would like to express my gratitude to CESP for successfully carrying out the audit of our TV audience measurement panel in India, one of the largest in the world. TV viewership measurement in India comes with a lot of challenges owing to the size, scale and diversity of the country. Despite these challenges, the CESP team of highly skilled data scientists and statisticians were able to conduct their study with utmost commitment. One key aspect about the CESP study is that the team spends time understanding the market: its Positives and Challenges. This understanding of the market is helpful in formulating the observations as well. BARC India has benefited from the global expertise of CESP. The in-depth study conducted by CESP has helped us to understand the strong position we hold when it comes to being at par with the international best practices. In the course of the certification, CESP has brought to our notice our strengths and limitations. The Certification provided by CESP to BARC India is of great value as it helps us to re-assure the industry of the representativeness of the current measurement system. We look forward to a fruitful collaboration with CESP in the coming years to consult and continue its evaluation of BARC India’s Television Viewership Measurement Service. »

RUSSIA

CESP continues to support Mediascope and the Russian media industry through the certification of the weighting process every 6 months in 2018. Indeed, Mediascope challenges the relevance of the weighting parameters twice a year. This certification process covers the weighting procedure and its deployment.

SINGAPORE

In July, CESP kicked off the annual audit of the multiscreen measurement system of TV programs and videos in Singapore. As a part of this audit, CESP conducted real life tests of the data collection on mobile devices: smartphone and tablet.

DIGITAL AD TRUST

Advertisers and media agencies are more and more concerned about the quality of digital ad inventories.

The French media and advertising associations (SRI, UDECAM, GESTE, UDA, ARPP, and IAB) launched a major initiative to promote the quality of digital inventories back in 2017. The certification framework covers five dimensions (viewability, brand safety, fraud, user experience and data privacy) and twelve compulsory criteria.
CESP and ACPM have been chosen by the industry to write the framework, audit and certify the quality of websites.

Since the beginning of 2018, CESP and ACPM have deployed the certification. 78 websites have been certified to date.

More information at www.digitaladtrust.fr/le-label

Audit of Data Management Platform

The media industry uses Data Management Platforms (DMP) more and more to sell digital inventories. CESP deployed a new audit process covering the data sources, their processing, the recency of the information and the indicators of quality. This new audit protocol was deployed to audit Gravity, a large French DMP using 150 websites to build more than 2000 data segments.

CESP reinforces its Data Science department with a new Director

A new collaborator joined CESP in June to manage the team of 2 data scientists!
In charge of the Data Science department, Olivier Hays has worked for many years as a quantitative engineer in the bank and industry sectors.

He especially participated in the elaboration of reglementary statistic models and in the management of data processing projects with high technological issues.

Olivier is graduated from ENSIMAG (National School of data processing and applied mathematics of Grenoble).

Talking about innovation…

In Spain, as a part of a conference organized by AIMC, a professional association dedicated to media measurement, Olivier Daufresne, CESP Associate Director, shared the set-up of the Digital Ad Trust label, with the Spanish media industry.

For more information on Digital Ad Trust, please read the article below.

Sharing our experience

In Algeria, CESP led a discussion about the audience measurement standardization with the media industry, during a seminar organized by Media Survey, CESP shared its international experience and guidelines on audience measurement. In this approach of measurement standardization, CESP is going to audit the TV audience measurement survey conducted by Media Survey in Algeria.

CESP participated to the EMRO conference, organized in May (26th to 29th of May, at Brno, Czech Republic), and shared 3 presentations:

Migrating from ONE to ONE Next: the joys of launching a new audience survey by Gilbert Saint-Joanis (ACPM) and Patricia Schultz (CESP) - The French publishers have decided to launch a new innovative audience survey. ACPM and CESP presented the key learnings from the pilot phase which comprised qualitative tests as well as a large scale quantitative study.

Challenges of the digital world, a new opportunity for JICs by Nicolas Cour (ACPM) and Valérie Morrisson (CESP) – Although investment in digital advertising is still growing overall, there is a need to reassure advertisers on the quality of inventories. The paper presented a new initiative of the French industry called Digital Ad Trust as well as DOOH Trust and explained how ACPM and CESP joined forces to meet the industry needs.

[R]evolution of Internet Audience Measurement in France by Dany Peria (CESP) – Médiamétrie and CESP presented the two main changes introduced in internet measurement at the beginning of 2018 in France. The internet audience currency is now based on the measurement of 3 screens, desktop, mobile and tablet. Médiamétrie also took the opportunity of this change in method to simplify deliverables used for mediaplanning and deliver recommendations to the industry on how to use these new individual data.

Moreover, Olena Mironova, TV audience measurement director at TIC, the Ukrainian TV audience measurement JIC, shared the conclusion of the audit conducted by CESP and the action plan defined after the audit.