BENGALURU: More than two-thirds of the calendar year 2018 (CY 2018) is over. The major Indian festival season is just around the corner and the tempo of brands presenting themselves to television viewers can only go up. Notwithstanding the fact that the number of television channels that bear the Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC) watermark, (and hence the number of reported ad insertions going up), the number of TV ads in 2018 have increased as compared to 2017, if one were to go by BARC’s weekly data of tp 10 advertisers across genres in terms of weekly insertions.
So which were the brands that advertised the most on television during the first 37 weeks of 2018? Using BARC’s weekly data for in terms of ad insertions between week 1 (Saturday, 30 December 2017) and week 37 of 2018 (Saturday, 8 September 2018 to Friday, 14 September 2018), here below is a list of the top 20 brands in terms of average ad insertions in during the first 37 weeks of 2018.

It must be noted that the average insertions by each brand has been calculated based on the number of insertions and the number of weeks it was present in BARC’s weekly lists during the first 37 weeks of 2018 (period under consideration) in this report. The actual average insertions by each brand could be higher or lower, also there could be other brands that may have had a higher number of TV ad insertions and yet were not present in BARC’s lists. The only eligibility criteria for a brand to find a place in the list below in this paper is that the brand must have been present for at least 5 of the first 37 weeks of 2018 in BARC’s weekly lists of top 10 brands in terms TV ad insertions. The team has refrained from criteria such as considering data of only the top 3 or the top 5 in BARC’s weekly lists.
The following major observations are being reported.

1. No brand was present in BARC’s weekly lists of Top 10 brands across genres for all the first 37 weeks of 2018. Only one brand – the travel portal Trivago was present for 35 of the first 37 weeks of 2018 in BARC’s weekly lists. Based on average insertions/week, Trivago has been ranked 15 in the list below
2. However, in terms of total number of insertions during the first 37 weeks of 2018, it was Reckitt Benckiser’s cleaning and disinfecting products brand Lizol that had more combined total of weekly insertions during the 29 of the first 37 weeks of 2018 that it was present in BARC’s weekly lists of the top 10 brands across genres as compared to Trivago. Based on average insertions, Lizol has been ranked 4 in the list below.
3. The online shopping site Amazon.in was ranked no 1 in terms of average TV ads per week. Based on total number of insertions when present in BARC’s weekly lists, Amazon.in has a rank of 13. This could be a dicey conclusion – the brand was present for just six of the 37 weeks of 2018 in BARC’s weekly lists of top 10 brands. Its actual average weekly insertions are likely to be much lower during the period under consideration. And this could be the case of the other brands in the list below: