Thread by @maheshmurthy

A thread: My personal experience with #TRPscam:
(1) It’s been rigged in India for at least 30 years
(2) Not just @Republic but many channels benefit
(3) Scam value is up to Rs. 25,000 cr a year
(3) Don't blame Republic, but @WPP that owns @Mindshare @GroupMworldwide @Ogilvy
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In early 90s I lived in HK & helped MTV launch in India (Quickgun Murugan times).

I moved to the US. Was then hired in 1999 to come back to India to try turn around rival Channel V (We Are Like This Only times)

As we geared for re-launch, we agonized on distribution
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Back then India didn’t have too many satellite dish households. Majority got channels from the friendly neighbourhood cable mafioso.

Most TVs then couldn’t carry 100s of channels and we desperately wanted to be on prime or sub-prime band so people could at least receive us
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This basically meant the top 20 or 30 ‘slots’ on the TV.

The Distribution team’s job was to be nice-nice with 100s of cable mafiosi around India so they could place us on a good slot.

(The distribution teams for TV channels were the true heroes of the business)
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We’d lined up advertisers for the re-launch who liked our new programming (“not just music channel but youth channel”)

But they all asked us, “What do you think your TRPs will be at?”

Of course, the better we rated, the more they could justify spending on us.
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Now a TRP is a Television Rating Point. A TRP of 10 means 10% of Indians with a TV in your demo/geo are tuned in to your channel right now.

MTV and Channel V were what's called “niche channels”. We basically hoped for a TRP of 1. That was good enough for us.
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The big guys then showed saas-bahu serials & got TRPs of 10 or more regularly.

They were demi-gods. We were small fry.

Now MTV knew we were up to a re-launch and suddenly we saw their ratings spike. A show there even got a 10 from South Mumbai during prime time: 7 - 9 pm
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It was an average show, how was this even possible?

Did we judge the audience wrong? Were we going to fail miserably?

(An aside: the head of MTV India then is head of TV ratings agency under siege, @BARCindia now, and it may just be a coincidence).
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In one of our meetings our distribution guy piped up – “Boss, why do you worry? You tell me what ratings you want, I’ll get it for you. Don’t worry, we’ll beat MTV.”

These didn’t sound like empty consoling words. I took him aside and badgered him: WTF do you mean?
9/n

He basically said – just clear an extra Rs. 2 lakhs a month, and I'll get you the ratings you want.

Astounded, I dug in, and here’s what I found.

The ratings then were measured by what’s called PeopleMeters, then administered by a company called TAM, owned by @WPP
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A peoplemeter was basically a device attached to a statistically representative sample of TV sets in homes in India. It automatically tracked what the TV was tuned to at what time. And this info was sent to TAM, which tabulated it and released it every week as TAM ratings
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In an older system, the householders kept a dairy of what they watched and submitted those in lieu. All those homes, of course got paid for all this by TAM.

Remember, just 2,000 people meter homes in India. And those determined what was then Rs. 10,000 crores of TV spend
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Now one assumed these sample home locations were a secret. But apparently, my distribution guys said, its not.

“I’ll get you a list of all of them” he said.

Wow.

Was it just him or other channels had them too? “Sirji” I was told “All of us have them”.

Double wow.
13/n

“So what now?" I asked.

So there are two ways to get the ratings you want. One, be nice to the households – send them freebies etc and they’ll tune in. Many channels do that. But there’s an even better way.

I listen
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Apparently many of these homes knew how important the metered TV set was & basically placed that set and its meter in a different room and gave control to the local cable fixer.

While the home actually watched whatever they wanted - on a different TV gifted to them.
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So, essentially this fixer sat, schedule in hand, at homes across India, switching to various channels at various times, based on whoever had 'fixed' whatever slot they wanted to rate in.

Wonderful Indian system. Jugaad this is, I think.
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So, I was told, s. 2 lakhs a month, and you’ll get the ratings you want.

Given that we were hoping to do just Rs. 20 crores a year back then, this was a really small price.

How exactly, I asked.

Well, see, I was told. 2,000 homes in India means 200 homes in Mumbai.
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200 homes in Mumbai means 20 homes in south Mumbai, 20 homes in Bandra/Khar etc & so on.

It just takes Rs. 50,000 a month to fix one meter. Give me 2 lakhs we’ll fix 4 of them all the time. Or 8 of them for half the time. Or even 20 of them across India for few hours a week
18/n

Pick your geo and pick your demo SEC A/B and there’s no big deal.

My. Mind. Was. Blown.

Of course the first thing I did was take it to the advertisers. The Cokes, the Pepsis, the Unilevers.

But weirdly, they didn’t want to hear about it.
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They didn’t want to know what went behind ratings.

They just wanted something to justify their spends, some paper trail.

Their media agencies @Mindshare @GroupM & such of course swore by the ratings. Regardless of the fact their owner @WPP owned the ratings company.
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Another time, I'll talk about how research houses owned by an agency group tend to show positive results for work by agencies in that group.

But now: a segue to media buying agencies.

Once upon a time, they took 15% of ad spend as commission. Hence 'agency' from 'agent'
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So the more you spent on TV and Print, the more they made.

Then clients got wise and started cutting the commission and paying a fee instead. Commissions fell to ~1%.

So the media buying agencies struck a deal with the TV channels instead.
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Tell the advertiser we are getting only 1% commission. But kick us back another 5% or 10% under the table.

(The mechanism was simple. One is a “credit note”. Say an ad buy costs Rs. 100 crores. TV channel sends an invoice to agency for Rs. 100 crores....
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...This is shown to include commission of 1 crore or 1%. Agency sends this to client and says please pay Rs. 100 crores. Client pays, thinking agency is only making Rs. 1 crore.

Meanwhile TV channel secretly sends credit note to agency...
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...saying “Hey we like you so much that we've given you an undocumented bulk discount or credit of 9 crores!”

So agency keeps 1cr from client and sets off Rs. 9 cr of imaginary credit & pays channel 90 cr, earning Rs. 10 cr in the process

(Hit thread limit. Next tweet:)
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