Mumbai: Addressing a long-standing gap in how affluence is measured for the media and entertainment (M&E) sector in India, Ormax Media has introduced OMA (Ormax Media Affluence), a new audience classification system designed specifically to reflect how individuals discover, consume, and pay for content.
Traditional socio-economic frameworks such as SEC and NCCS rely largely on household-level indicators and ownership of basic assets, many of which have limited relevance to modern media consumption. These models also treat affluence as a household attribute, whereas content consumption is increasingly shaped by individual behaviour, digital habits, and lifestyle choices. OMA aims to correct this misalignment by anchoring affluence directly in observed media behaviour and spending.
OMA is a scoring system built on 21 parameters spanning three consumption domains: family consumption at home, individual digital consumption, and out-of-home entertainment. The framework goes beyond access and frequency to account for the monetary value of consumption, including smartphone price points, number and type of paid OTT subscriptions, OTT rental spends, movie ticket prices, and spending on concerts, sports, and live performances. The resulting affluence score reflects an individual’s propensity to invest both time and money in M&E products and services.
Based on cumulative scores across these parameters, audiences are classified into four segments—OMA A, B, C, and D—creating a media-relevant hierarchy of affluence. This enables the industry to move beyond generic socio-economic labels and adopt a framework that is directly linked to content consumption and monetisation potential.
For media companies, platforms, and marketers, OMA enables sharper audience-led decision-making. Streaming platforms can more accurately size and prioritise user cohorts, content owners can assess the revenue potential of formats and genres, and advertisers can align media planning with actual spending propensity rather than broad income proxies. By grounding affluence in real media behaviour, OMA improves the reliability of audience segmentation across content strategy, distribution, and monetisation.
OMA was introduced in The Ormax OTT Audience Report: 2025. Ormax Media has announced that the classification system will be integrated across its research and analytics products going forward, embedding media-led affluence as a core lens for audience understanding in India’s rapidly evolving entertainment ecosystem.
