HT and ToI's number wars: Why don't marketers care about their Rs.15,000 crore?

During the past ten days or so, consumers of news have been inundated with messages from The Times of India and The Hindustan Timespresenting their respective views on which paper is the leader in Delhi NCR.

To the lay consumer, the videos are gobbledygook, filled as they are with unfamiliar jargon - ABC, IRS, readers per issue, and so on.

It’s not gobbledygook to those in media and marketing - and that’s the reason for this post.

For me, there’s only one take out after viewing both videos and after reading all the ads and edit pieces - that the measurement of readership and circulation in India is a complete embarrassment.

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The ABC study, which measures circulation, is boycotted by some publications and embraced by others, depending on whether the figures show them in good light or otherwise. Every single major publication house has, at some time or other, boycotted the ABC.

The IRS is now caught in a mess, being rejected by a number of publications, with some having gone to court and others planning to. As a result, the ’latest’ IRS figures are hopelessly dated, reporting a period which is now over a year old.

What circulation and readership studies are intended to do is to allow marketers to better spend their budgets and reach their target audiences with higher efficiency.

Which brings me to the point. Why are marketers, who fund the publications, putting up with readership and circulation data which is dated, unreliable, and so on?

Why are the media planning and buying agencies, which subscribe to the data so that they can spend their clients’ budgets better putting up with this state of affairs?

Marketers silence or indifference is more perplexing when one considers that, in 2104, total spend on print is projected to be over Rs. 15,000 crore, a 17 percent growth over the previous year.

For the publications, it matters little whether the measurement data is reliable or not, as long as they continue to grow at a fair clip.

For marketers, though, it’s very different: poor measurement means that they can never be quite certain that they are spending their money well.

A similar situation prevails in the TV area, with the existing yardstick, TAM, in a cloud and the replacement, BARC, delayed till at least Q2 2015. The TV spend in 2104 is projected to be more than Rs. 14,000 crore.

That’s over Rs. 29,000 crore of brand spend that is based on unreliable or dated data - and no one seems to care.

That stuns me.