For decades, video content has undoubtedly reigned supreme in content consumption, with linear television dominating the advertising landscape. Its power lay in its ability to deliver mass reach, particularly during prime time and major live events, fostering a unique “appointment viewing” culture that remains dominant in India. Think of the collective national experience during a Cricket World Cup final or a popular GEC show’s dramatic climax – moments that still command immense, synchronous audiences.
However, the rise of digital streaming has fundamentally reshaped this dynamic. The internet ushered in an era of unmatched convenience, allowing viewers to access a vast universe of content anytime, anywhere, on multiple devices. Despite this surge in digital consumption, linear TV remarkably retains a significant appointment viewing audience, particularly in India’s diverse demographic segments. This creates a complex but fascinating viewership landscape.
We can broadly categorize India’s video audience into three distinct, yet sometimes overlapping, segments:
- Linear TV Audience: These viewers primarily engage with traditional broadcast television, often driven by habit, cultural preferences, and major live events. Their viewing behaviour is typically synchronous.
- Digital-Only Audience: This segment consumes content exclusively on streaming devices like Connected TVs (CTV), mobile phones, or the web. Their preferences often lean towards on-demand content, personalized experiences, and a younger, more tech-savvy demographic. Crucially, their viewing habits and content preferences are distinctly different from linear TV viewers, leading to minimal duplication at any given time.
- Duplicated Audience: A smaller segment that straddles both linear TV and digital platforms.
Advertisers, quite rightly, aspire to reach every viewer that resonates with their target audience, regardless of the platform. But to identify this audience, there is a challenge as the Indian media and entertainment industry currently lacks a single, unified reporting platform or data source that seamlessly represents viewership and advertising performance across both traditional and digital mediums. This challenge is increased when attempting to report performance across individual broadcasters. The CTV market, for instance, is highly fragmented, with content availability varying significantly across different operating systems and OEMs. Also, critical content like live streams of GECs, Movies, and Music often face content licensing restrictions, preventing their live streaming on major walled garden platforms like YouTube and Meta. This fragmentation makes a holistic view incredibly elusive.
Beyond this, prominent measurement agencies such as BARC, Comscore, TAM, and Chrome operate with diverse data collection methodologies, differing reporting metrics, and varying data parameters. This lack of standardization makes it nearly impossible to reconcile data sets and provide a true cross-platform view. The consequences of this fragmentation are significant. Broadcasters struggle to fully demonstrate their ROI, while advertisers lack the confidence to precisely attribute campaign objectives across platforms. Without doubt, streamlining this measurement ecosystem would create a win-win scenario for all stakeholders – broadcasters, advertisers, and even content creators.
I believe this critical challenge can be resolved, at least to a significant extent, by agreeing on two fundamental factors:
- Traditional and Digital Measurement Mapping: Accepting that traditional measurement methodologies can be mapped with digital data due to advancements in data collection processes. This isn’t about replacing one with the other but finding common ground for comparative analysis.
- Differentiated Engagement: Recognizing that content engagement differs significantly between traditional and digital platforms. Digital platforms inherently offer interactivity and clear Calls-to-Action (CTAs), leading to different engagement metrics. Advertisers must therefore consider streaming audience reach as a distinct and additive layer to linear TV, rather than assuming direct duplication. The same audience is rarely watching the exact same content on both mediums simultaneously.
With these factors, a viable solution emerges for integrating linear TV, digital video, and CTV measurement. This necessitates a robust collaboration between India’s national measurement agencies:
- Agency One (Linear TV Focus): One agency would continue to report linear TV data but with a refined focus on metrics more relevant to digital, such as viewability, city-level data, and minutes watched per viewer. This would provide a richer, more granular understanding of linear consumption that can be better aligned with digital metrics.
- Agency Two (Digital & CTV Focus): The second agency would be responsible for reporting data from walled gardens (as Comscore already does for platforms like YouTube) and meticulously collecting data from all other digital platforms, including Web, App, and the increasingly crucial CTV ecosystem. This comprehensive digital data collection would provide the missing pieces of the cross-platform puzzle.
By encouraging this collaborative, integrated approach to measurement, the Indian media and entertainment ecosystem can finally unlock its full potential, empowering all stakeholders with actionable insights for better business outcomes. The future of video advertising in India hinges on his unified vision.
(Views are personal)
