TAM Media Research is getting ready to fight the new Audience Measurement System to be introduced by Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC). However, deflecting the attention from the direct big fight, TAM is gearing up to supersede BARC with advanced measurement technology to measure consumption of video content in multiple platforms that goes beyond Television, with the launch of viewership ratings for cross-media platforms Web Audience Measurement (WAM).
This will include viewership data for laptop, desktop, tablets, mobiles, etc. As LV Krishnan, CEO of TAM puts it, “television alone is passe” with people spending more time on other screens. Therefore WAM, or web audience measurement, is the next logical move, he says.
In an expanding market where newer platforms are coming up to watch videos, there are multiple ways to measure viewership and hence there arises a need to comprehensively measure the different platforms to understand different consumption pattern of the audience.
“First, we will be soon providing measurement for cross-media viewership in the markets we are present in. We believe that television alone is passé as people spend more time on other screens, watching and consuming various kinds of content. That means TV plus online is the next step for TAM. So TAM to WAM (web audience measurement) is the next move”. said LV Krishnan
”This also means that soon we will be moving from using panel data to universal data. Basically, we will be combining data received for consumption of content on various devices such as mobile along with the data mined from the set-top boxes to get much more enriched data at a lower cost. This in turn means that I don’t need to install 50,000 people meter for samples as monitoring of content on web provides us with 5 million samples””. added LV Krishnan
He further added that ”While television is linear in nature, the online world in non-linear in nature so we will segregate and measure content by genre. We will have viewership data on the basis of classification of genre of content but not data for specific content. The idea behind the task is to provide the information that viewers are watching a particular genre of content so that the return on money invested is aligned with that particular genre of content”.
TAM’s new initiative WAM, is defiantly the need of the hour solution for Marketers and Agencies to understand the audience behavior in a single measurement platform. So, it is expected to make the advertisers and ad agencies (if not the broadcasters) to turn back towards WAM for their larger needs to understand and decide on allocating their spend towards mediums like Television and Digital.
