• Abuse of Monopoly
• Confl ict of Interest....
• Unethical Behaviour
• Misleading Research
Let us say you are running a private detective agency. Both the husband and wife – who are probably estranged and are also rivals, because they seek dirt on each other – approach you to do 'market research'.
What would you do if you had even a modicum of ethics; or were scared of some variation of a cop somewhere coming down like a ton of bricks on you? You would tell one of the rivals that you can't take up the job; much as the money is tantalising and much as the act of playing both sides is exciting. Let's carry this story forward and say that your market research seems to reveal two different results; surely that should happen with rivals? Then isn't it your moral responsibility to at least present both sides to the two rivals even as you are playing one against the other?
You might be wondering why I am going on and on with this. But please do read carefully what has been written earlier. The ‘market research’ detective in this case is the now notorious and yet unflappable ACNielsen- ORG MARG and the two clients in question are the two rival television networks Star and TV Today. Star runs the Hindi news channel Star News while TV Today runs Aaj Tak in Hindi and Headlines Today in English. Both are clear cut rivals in the television news space and fi ght aggressively for eyeballs as well as advertising bucks. Both, like every other publication (including this one) or channel, go for poll forecasts, because it is the thing to do. Most media critics slam these polls as a farce. Says critic Sudhish Pachauri, “Actually, such surveys are done to hide some facts and highlight some other kind of lies. In India, they do what they want to do, what they have decided already and plan the result accordingly. Such agencies work in a planned manner during elections in India in favour of one particular lobby, so that what they say harms the other lobby.”
Now let's get back to how and why ACNielsen (Th Ni Co) & ORG Marg chose to ignore the glaring conflict of interest while dealing with two rival channels Star News and Aaj Tak cum Headlines Today. Sure, Star Network, which brings out Star News apart from Ananda Bazar Patrika and TV Today, which brings out Aaj Tak and Headlines Today apart from India Today, are not an estranged couple.
They haven't filed for divorce the way Subhash Chandra, the real pioneer of satellite TV in India and Rupert Murdoch did many years ago. And yet, both paid money to the same detective – ACNielsen-ORG Marg in this case. ACNielsen did a survey cum poll forecast for Star News that predicted some possible results for the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. Around the same time, ORG MARG did something similar for the TV Today group. Remember, the guys who did all this are all paid from the same source – an outfit t called VNU based out of Netherlands, which controls all of them. Of course, there was a conflict of interest. So ACNielsen did seat projections while ORG MARG did vote shares. It is like the detective telling the wife that the husband had chased 20 bimbos even as he told the husband that the wife was chasing quality gigolos.
The million dollar question is: why did the rival channels pay the same agency for the same work when they had other options? I mean, it is not as if ACNielsen is the only market research outfit in the country...
And why did they pay? Both channels wanted a forecast for the assembly elections coming up in Uttar Pradesh. After all, juicy forecasts help the channels get television rating points (TRPs) that get the ad revenue (TRPs). So we have a situation where ACNielsen doles out a poll forecast for one channel. And lo and behold, ORG MARG does a poll forecast for another channel. Till some intrepid analysts pointed it out, nobody seemed to notice that ACNielsen and ORG MARG are one and the same thing. So how can one spy or a detective or an investigative agency do the same work for two rivals? Even if they are not estranged spouses? Or if you are a marketing consultant – can you imagine
selling the same strategy to two rival brands and getting away? If you are an academician, can you imagine doing the same research for two universities, taking money from them and getting away? If you are a journalist, can you imagine asking two rival publications to publish your stories, get paid by both of them and get away? If you are an accountant, can you audit accounts of two rival companies, get paid by both of them and get away?
So how does does ACNielsen get away? How does ACNielsen – add ORG MARG – get away with so many obviously unacceptable practices? Let us for a moment forget about unacceptable practices. Let us concentrate on the fantastic track record that ACNielsen has on poll forecasts; the reason why most news TV channels in India seem to seek it out for future ridicule. Back in 2004, ACNielsen humiliated the doyen of Indian psephology Prannoy Roy. It did an opinion poll for Roy's network NDTV that predicted a comfortable majority for the then ruling NDA. Th e actual results were a shocker and Dr. Roy actually had to eat humble pie – not that it matters in Indian media. Any sensible person would have thought that the guys who were doing the poll forecast for NDTV would go away, shamed and disgraced by their peers... And that Nielsen would express some honest regrets. Anybody and everybody happened to be wrong because Nielsen has gone from strength to strength since then – including poll forecasts that are at best a shame, and
at worst possibly a scam. Do remember the two polls for two channels that were conducted for the Uttar Pradesh elections.
Even a child would ask two questions. First, how does ACNielsen get away with all this? Second, why do TV channels and networks give any business to ACNielsen despite its horrendous track record and its brazen flouting of conflict of interest issues? Well, no top honcho in the television industry likes to be put on record; but the reason is an elephant in the room called TAM that nobody dares to ignore. ACNielsen controls and conducts the TAM survey that is the last word in India on how popular TV channels and shows are. Basically, TAM gives the so called television rating points
(TRPs) that are used by media buyers to allocate ads to TV channels and also fix the rates of those ads. Writing for a media website, analyst Abhishek Upadhyay hits the nail on the head when he says, “The question is, do the channels have a choice? How can any channel defy the source of their bread and butter? At what risks can a channel deny tendering the lucrative opinion poll contract to such an influential entity?”
Amazingly, ACNielsen continues to monopolise the business of television rating points in India despite repeated controversies raised over the accuracy, reliability and credibility of the TAM ratings. Till some time back, Nielsen conducted TAM by installing just about 3000 set top boxes across India to measure audience preferences. Some of you are aware that there are close to 140 million households with a TV set in India. So how will a sample size of 3000 do any justice to the whole task? In fact, the sample size is so laughably low that no market research outfit with any self respect would tout it as the industry norm. Yet, Nielsen persisted with it till there were storms of protest and it was forced to install anywhere between 15,000 and 20,000 set top boxes. Even then, the sample size is about 0.001% of the total market. Says Ferzad Palia, Senior VP and GM, English Entertainment, Viacom 18 Media Pvt Ltd, “There has been a lot of discussion on this already. TAM’s criteria has oft en been questioned by the television fraternity on where these 2000 odd sets are placed in the country, because most of the people we know do not have any such machines placed in their homes. And how can such a small number out of millions of households watching television give us a fair picture of the number one news or entertainment channel? But then, I would say that there is no point in taking digs at the mechanism of TAM because it is the only medium for us to know the trend."
Ferzad and people like him don’t like the monopoly exercised by ACNielsen over the fortunes of their organisations.
But they also seem to say that they are helpless. But can the television industry, with annual ad revenues in excess of
Rs.20,000 crore, afford not to take the bull by the horns? Look at the irony of it. Indian laws do not allow foreign investors to hold more than 26% equity in a television news channel. And yet, we have a allowed 100% control to a multinational over the levers that will determine the destiny of television news media. Isn’t it a matter serious enough for the government to step in? If authorities in India can intervene at the drop off a hat to stop objectionable content from electronic media, should it not intervene in a far more important issue that affects the very future of media in this country?
This magazine strongly believes that an outfit like ACNielsen should not be allowed to get away with all this. But the television industry can learn a lesson or two from consumer product companies in India if they felt – perhaps justifiably – that the research and the outcomes delivered by ACNielsen are misleading, inaccurate and unreliable.
Digest this. In 2010, the Nielsen Company came out with the "Most Trusted Brands" survey. Guess which airline did they rank #1, right at the top of the trust list, in aviation? Air India! Before you drop your jaws, allow us to mention, this was the fifty consecutive year that Air India had been bestowed the #1 rank in the survey.
No wonder, in our group magazine 4Ps B&M's 2010 India's Best Market Research Companies Survey, ACNielsen got a lowly rank of #13. The shocking rank was because of the ratings they got on the other parameters within the survey. On the parameter of reliability and authenticity of data, ACNielsen got a lowly 14th rank; some critical parameters too went the same way – cost effectiveness (15), time duration (19), transparency (14), favouritism (14), impact (17) and associations (14). What came clearly out is the visible lack of confidence in the research agency. One year later too in 2011, ACNielsen's rank was #11 only.
You see, ACNielsen also has conducted ‘market research’ for fast moving consumer goods companies like HUL, Godrej, Dabur, Perfetti Van Melle and P&G, to name just a few. Some of these companies have literally blown their tops and lost patience with the quality of research done by ACNielsen. And some have simply discontinued the services to ACNielsen. In an interview to The Economic Times, here is what the Chief Operating Officer of Dabur V.S Sitaram had to say, “ACNielsen has been consistently getting the data wrong in certain segments… our numbers
in some key sectors like hair oil were being consistently under-reported. So we have decided to discontinue subscribing to the data for some categories.”
If consumer product companies can tell ACNielsen where to get off , surely the dozens of television networks who feel that they are being taken for a ride by Nielsen can band together and do the same. Can't they?
