Wake UP CHANNEL, Media Buyers, and ADVERTISERS!

Dear Corporate Marketing Teams, Advertisers, Media Buyers, and Channel Heads,

A yen for your thoughts and a dime for your mistakes of thinking and perception.

Stop when you can.

How can you allow a mere 7000-8000 sample homes to determine where your Advertising dollars/dimes and rupees go???

How can you let your choice of Channels, SHOWS, and segments be ruled by Television Rating Points (TRPs) that are garnered from a mere 7000-8000 GEC homes where the people meter is setup??

So does that mean the millions of other users are non viewers and what if those 7000-8000 homes where you set up the box are all not real users but fake users sold to some brand or some corporate or some television channel or some production house and are easily manipulable or NOT EVEN the cross section of customers that your products are manufactured for?? Or may be those 7000-8000 users DO NOT EVEN buy the toothpaste that you advertise, right??? So how does that help you, haan!!!!

Don't people who watch apart from those SAMPLE HOMES BUY your products?
Don't people who watch ONLINE buy your products?
Don't they talk about your products?
Don't they talk about your Company?
Don't they talk about your Channel?
Don't they talk about your SHOW?

So, why are you discriminating against them?

How are TRPs calculated?

A carefully selected sample of households are provided with electronics which monitors which channel they are watching. Each member of the household presses a button to indicate when they are actually in front of the box.

TV ratings are normally calculated as "overnight" figures - meaning figures for a particular show are available the next day. They are compiled by giving special equipment ("boxes") which log viewing habits to a representative sample of the viewing public. Data from those is then downloaded and the figures calculated.

TAM or Nielsen Media Research collects and collates this information and releases this data on a weekly basis.


What NEEDS to be DONE?

Interestingly, neither Nielsen nor TAM seems to take into consideration any other data other than those 7000-8000 users around 4 major cities in India who may or may not be real or valid customers.

So is that not injustice of the grossest proportions to the other viewers? And if Corporate Heads, Ad Gurus are making choices based on such silly data then I say, they are doing a disservice to other viewers who are their customer base.

TAM and Nielsen need to take into consideration other avenues of rating viewership and consider NEW MEDIA as well as Online Viewership etc. I wonder if they take into consideration things like subscribed channels, pay-by-view, repeat telecast viewership.

These days TECHNOLOGY has improved and BANDWIDTH has INCREASED, so an INTERNET/BROADBAND CONNECTION is easy as a CABLE CONNECTION and is much more preferred as YOU CAN DO OTHER THINGS on INTERNET besides watching a SHOW unlike TELEVISION where ALL that you could do is WATCH A SHOW.

And online you can watch "N" number of times or multiple times while on TELEVISION you can watch only some times and that too at times that may not be within your CONTROL.

So UNDERSTAND the CHANGING MARKET DYNAMIC and ADOPT ACCORDINGLY!!

Conclusions

Whatever be it, advertisers should understand that a show like GEET Hui Sabsey Parayi has a huge following overseas as well as ONLINE VIEWERSHIP and constant buzz everywhere and by NOT understanding the new media dynamic TRPs are doing great injustice to shows like GEET HSP.

We need a change in Advertising logic and we need the Channel also to cock-a-snook at such meaningless rating and viewership figures.

Taking a skew of just the viewers and fans from IF and FB alone, we can say that at least 50% watch online, and 50% watch repeats, and more than 70% of the audience view more than 2 times online.

So come on, be reasonable and give us some credit and use your heads before your determine to axe our show or make TRPs as the BE-ALL and END-ALL for decision making.

Additional NOTES from an earlier post in the series:

Geet is the N, 1 show in ONLINE viewership figures on Star Player/Desiforums/Daily Motion/Apnicommunities/Youtube

A romantic/well crafted episode of GEET garners on top of 10000- 15000 views
An average episode of GEET garners on top of 7000-10000 views
A bad episode of GEET garners somewhere around the region of 4000-6000 views

On STAR PLAYER alone which is the official ONLINE site of the CHANNEL.

But the videos of TODAY's episode are uploaded here after 3 PM the next day so they are missing out some figures to unofficial uploaders.

Secondly, had they uploaded it by 12 midnight they could have garnered more online viewership figures. But they are NOT doing so!!!

Or how about porting content through subscribed channel at the same time as the episode airs in India or within half-an-hour of the episode airing?

Please also comment on the below important post:

Preview
[Is GEET HSP parayi to Channel?]

hey there!

Kiran...I agree. If Star One shows the episode online with ads, fans of the show globally would watch to bring them revenues.

@Kiran: Streaming is something they ought to consider online as well as uploading in the official channel for paid subscribers. But having said that taking a sample of just 8000 "representative" viewers is NOT gonna help in a hugely populated country like India IMHO.

@Jaya: Absolutely, and STAY PLAYER has the best quality HQ videos, even Daily Motion and DesiforumsTV have some of the most finest quality videos.

Even in the US which has not even 1/3 rd the population that India has, they take into consideration something to the tune of 25,000 homes and the UK which has probably 1/10th population India has takes into account something close to the same number as in USA.

And you have to take into consideration that STAR ONE is not available on all cable networks and is not offered by some cable operators, so how does TRPs give a true picture of how many people are really watching GEET HSP and by what means?

For example "GARNIER" is branded with GEET Hui Sabsey Parayi, you think ONLINE viewers do NOT KNOW that fact and does that NOT factor in - in the consumer behavior in purchase of shampoos if it needs to be taken into consideration??

@ Bri; True, 7000 is a ridiculously small sample size for India. Let alone the combined viewership of india and overseas.

Originally posted by: freezinheat

hey there!

u do make a point, but it has to b pointed out that the videos uploaded online have the adverts cut out and so adds nothing to the corporates' marketing goals. so asking them to give us our due is a bit unfair.

wat they cud do however is think of making online viewership somehow 'official'. streaming online, same time as the episode airs on tv, ads n all. since no one's ever done that, i have no idea how feasible that'll b for them.

Even if not immediately, they can still make it available online on an official site from where they can generate ad revenue. I watched Ramayan on broadband.bigflix.com,and they used to show 2 or 3 ads per each episode, every time the episode is played. So, I know it can be done. Besides, they can also charge minimal amount like say 40 cents for downloading the videos or they can require a Netflix-online watch kind of a user account to make the episodes available, for which they can charge minimal monthly amount and still make considerable profit. It is being done for most shows in US, you can watch them on Netflix or Hulu that way.

@Kiran: Star One according to reports has invested some 15% in their Digital Media Marketing. And I don't think investing in streaming servers is such a bad investment coming to it, if they really did wanna benefit from the Internet and Broadband revolution.

@Sksg:Exactly, what is good for Ramayan should be good for Star One right by the credo that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Star One also has DTH or Direct to Home services in the US and other locations, I wonder why this is not being leveraged more and what about those figures in calculating viewership figures???