NEW DELHI: The Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC India) is said to be in talks with an Israeli media technology company to customise for it tools for digital measurement, which is likely to be rolled out in phases from sometime in 2017 or early 2018 and could go on to make BARC India an organisation measuring TV+digital eco-systems.
After having issued Request for Information (RfI) for digital measurement in December 2015 and having received responses from 11 leading vendors from across the world, BARC India had come out last year Request for Proposals for the same.
BARC India is presently working on digital proof of concept that will help it in testing different technologies, methodologies and potential capabilities of the shortlisted vendors.
The companies that had responded to the RfI included agencies such as Kantar Media, IMRB, ComScore, Nielsen, MediaMetrie, Gracenote (in December 2016 it entered into an agreement to be acquired by Nielsen), Informate, GfK, Accenture, EY, eywa Media, Gemius and Verto Analytics.
It was in October 2015 that BARC India CEO Partho Dasgupta had announced at a panel discussion on new TAM models at CASBAA Convention in Hong Kong that the audience measurement organisation was looking at launching digital measurement and will float a global tender for vendor(s).
Industry sources indicated that the Israeli company could be Actus Digital, a global provider of broadcast media and video technologies, and that the exploratory talks between the company and BARC India could be revolving around customising measurement tools for India instead of simply re-deploying universal tools generally used by big companies for digital data collection.
However, it must be admitted that Indiantelevision.com could not independently confirm the name of the Israeli company from either BARC India or the company concerned till the time of writing this report.
The barely two-year-old BARC India, which initially focussed on measuring TV viewing habits via BAR-O-Meters through watermarking technology, is now expanding into the digital realm.
BARC India is jointly promoted by the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF), the Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA) and the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) with the latter two organisations holding 20 per cent each, while the broadcasting body holds 60 per cent.
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