Definition

Television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

 rating points

Ratings (broadcast)

Ratings is a term used to describe the methods used by radio, cable and terrestrial television programming measure their performance. Ratings are collated using audience measurement.-Mechanisms for Calculating Ratings :...

, or TRPs, are an audience measurement

Audience measurement

Audience measurement measures how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic on websites...

 criterion that indicates the popularity of a television channel or programme. The TRP measure is very useful for advertisers, who use it to help them decide which TV channels and programmes to place their advertising in.

The TRP is a measure of the purchased points representing an estimate of the component of the target audience

Target audience

In marketing and advertising, a target audience, is a specific group of people within the target market at which the marketing message is aimed .....

 within the gross audience. Similar to GRP (short for gross rating point

Gross Rating Point

Gross rating point is a term used in advertising to measure the size of an audience reached by a specific media vehicle or schedule. It is the product of the percentage of the target audience reached by an advertisement, times the frequency they see it in a given campaign...

), it is measured as the sum of ratings achieved by a specific media vehicle (e.g. TV channel or programme) of the target audience reached by an advertisement. For example, if an advertisement appears more than once, reaching the entire gross audience also, the TRP figure is the sum of each individual GRP, multiplied by the estimated target audience in the gross audience.

The TRP and GRP metrics are both critical components for determining the marketing effectiveness

Marketing effectiveness

Marketing effectiveness is the quality of how marketers go to market with the goal of optimizing their spending to achieve good results for both the short-term and long-term...

 of a particular advertisement.

Collection of TV audience measurement

Audience measurement

Audience measurement measures how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic on websites...

 data in India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

Presently, INTAM (Indian television audience measurement) is the only electronic rating agency functioning in India. INTAM uses two methodologies for calculating TRPs.

The first is frequency monitoring, in which 'people meter

People meter

A people meter is a audience measurement tool used to measure the viewing habits of TV and cable audiences.The People Meter is a 'box', about the size of a paperback book. The box is hooked up to each television set and is accompanied by a remote control unit. Each family member in a sample...

s' are installed in sample homes. People meters are electronic devices, which continuously record data about the TV channels watched by household members. The 'people meter' is an expensive piece of equipment and is currently imported. It reads the frequencies of TV channels, which are later decoded into the name of the channels. INTAM prepares national data on the basis of these sample homes readings. There is a drawback in the technique, as cable operators

Cable television

Cable television is a system of providing television programs to consumers via radio frequency signals transmitted to televisions through coaxial cables or digital light pulses through fixed optical fibers located on the subscriber's property, much like the over-the-air method used in traditional...

frequently change the frequencies of channels before sending signals to homes. It may be very misleading to read a channel according to a particular frequency even if the down-linking frequency is same all over India.

The second technique is more reliable and relatively new to India. Via a picture-matching technique, the people meter continuously records a small portion of the picture that is being watched on that particular television set. Along with this, INTAM also records all the channels' data in the form of the small picture portion. Data collected from the sample homes is later on matched with the main databank to interpret the TV channel name, in order to produce national ratings.