Indiantelevision.com Team

(17 September 2007 3:30 pm)

MUMBAI: The leading industry associations of the advertising sector have formed a joint industry body called the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) to oversee and control the TV audience measurement system in India.

The formation of the BARC comes in the wake of rising opposition in the ad sector to the existing forms of media measurement. A need has been felt research to be conducted an ad industry body that is constituted by the coming together of the associations of respective media owners, advertisers and advertising agencies to ensure transparency, funding support and sustainability while keeping the interests of users of study upper most in mind.

It will be recalled that in October 1997 the ad industry had come together to form a Joint Industry Body (JIB) consisting of ISA and AAAI who had after detailed evaluation signed an agreement with AC Nielsen and IMRB jointly and thus was born TAM.

The absence of a formal structure for JIB led to it not being in a position to strictly implement what it had set out to do.

BARC will try to provide accurate, up-to-date and relevant research relating to television and other audio/video media, including but not restricted to TV ratings, for TV programming and spot ratings without fear or favour in a completely transparent and objective manner and at a reasonable cost to users.

The board of directors will also appoint a technical committee which will be chaired by Vikram Sakhuja. Pradeep Guha representing the IBF will be the first chairman of BARC. The chairman’s term will be two years.

The founding directors of BARC representing the three associations will be - Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA) - Bharat Patel, Nitin Paranjape, Kurush Grant, J C Chopra; The Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF) - Chintamani Rao, Paritosh Joshi, Pradeep Guha, Rohit Gupta; Advertising Agencies Association Of India (AAAI) - Madhukar Kamath, Sam Balsara, Shashi Sinha, Lynn de Souza.

The council will be a not-for-profit body registered as a section 25 company with a nominal share capital contributed equally by Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA), Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF) and Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI).

The company will have only 3 members which are the leading advertising sector associations representing the 3 interest groups - advertisers, media owners and advertising agencies.

Over the next few weeks BARC will finalise the specifications, process and business model that it will adopt for TV Audience Measurement Research and the nature of financing.

According to an official release, the council is being set-up after extensive review of best practices from around the world for the conduct and supervision of TV research and closely referring to the guidelines on it as recommended by World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and European Association of Communications Agencies (EACA).

The founding directors are confident that with the formation of BARC, the quality and scope of TV audience research will get upgraded, the findings will be more robust and funding more transparent.

The Council may appoint a single vendor for obtaining required data or may consider breaking entire assignment in 2-3 parts and appoint different vendors to conduct each part.