Why is BARC's plan to monitor premium viewers stuck in the slow lane?

The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) will be launching a premium household panel soon to measure viewership in affluent homes. The initiative aims to represent better high-income audiences often underrepresented in traditional ratings. However, the audience measurement body has been facing recruitment challenges in these households, making the rollout dependent on overcoming these hurdles. 

BARC has planned to deploy approximately 5,000 premium household panels to measure viewership trends in this category.

“The introduction of a premium panel is a significant step forward for BARC. It will provide a more granular understanding of high-spending households, enabling brands to tailor their strategies effectively," BARC India chairman Shashi Sinha told e4m. 

Why is BARC struggling to recruit premium households?
 
Despite the BARC board's approval, there has been a delay in rolling out the initiative due to recruitment challenges. When it comes to premium homes, recruitment can be tricky, said Sinha.

“It is far more challenging than installing meters in regular BARC homes. While we’ve received board approval and the meters have started arriving, getting affluent households on board is a slow process. We excel at managing regular panels, but this is a different scenario. Until recruitment is complete, it's difficult to set a precise timeline. Once we stabilise viewership measurement in premium homes, we’ll move on to CTV. The groundwork is in progress, but recruitment remains a critical hurdle before full rollout,” he added. 

In regular BARC homes, a small monetary incentive and the sense of contributing to national viewership patterns often encourage participation. However, this approach doesn't work with premium households.

According to Sinha, monetary incentives are not effective, and the "ego boost" factor isn't as compelling for premium households who do not view participation in the same light.

The BARC India panel is recruited in a two-stage process. The first stage comprises the Broadcast India (BI) Establishment Survey (ES). This is a large-scale face-to-face survey of a sample of approximately 3 lakh households from the target population.

The ES furnishes a list of households (i.e., sampling frame) from which the panel itself is drawn. In the case where there are not sufficient ES records to meet panel recruitment needs, additional households are added to the sampling frame through the process of a listing study (LS). 

The second stage of the process is Recruitment. It is in the recruitment stage that the appropriate candidate households are approached to join the panel. 

BARC India currently measures TV viewing habits of close to 210 million TV households in the country, using 50,000+ sample panel homes.

The decision to empanel premium homes comes as digital and CTV consumption increases among affluent segments, emphasising the need for more accurate measurement tools.

India's real GDP is projected to grow over 6% annually from 2023 to 2028, according to Goldman Sachs Research. Concurrently, the wealth of affluent Indians is expected to rise significantly. By 2027, the affluent consumer segment is forecasted to expand from approximately 60 million in 2023 to 100 million, as highlighted in the Goldman Sachs report, ‘The Rise of ‘Affluent India’.