The Indian Newspaper Society (INS), which represents the print media industry in India, has extended support to the new consumer classification system proposed by the Market Research Society of India (MRSI), which has sparked intense debate in the media and over the past one week with stakeholders evaluating its impact on businesses.
In a conversation with e4m, Rakesh Sharma, President of INS, shed light on what news publishers opined about the Indian Socio-Economic Classification (ISEC), which seeks to disrupt how advertisers and broadcasters interpret consumer data – the currency by which advertisers pick publications and broadcasters for advertisement.
According to Rakesh Sharma, “The advertising landscape is dynamic, with advertisers constantly seeking the most effective avenues to reach their target audience. Thus, any changes or innovations in audience classification systems carry significant weight for publishers and advertisers alike.”
At the heart of INS's perspective lies the acknowledgment that advertisers' money is precious, he noted. Sharma further said that since ISEC is believed to be superior there is no harm in replacing it with the current system - NCCS (New Consumer Classification System), which has been in place for a decade now.
“Now it's up to the Media Research Users Council (MRUC) to implement the system in the next Indian Readership Survey (IRS). We hope the IRS is conducted soon,” Sharma noted.
Critical to advertisers, the consumer or readership data is the currency based on which they decide which print publications they want to advertise.
Notably, the IRS was the first to implement NCCS for viewership rankings in 2014, while the BARC implemented it for TV ratings in 2015, shared industry veterans.
However, the IRS has not been conducted since 2019. It was suspended in 2020 by the Media Research Users Council India (MRUC India) due to pandemic-led restrictions.
It must be noted that ratings for TV news channels were also paused for two years due to COVID and disputes over its methodology, but BARC resumed the ratings in 2022.
Advertisers have been pushing for ISEC as they increasingly feel the current system, developed more than a decade ago, has inherent flaws, which result in poor targeting of cohorts.
A section of advertisers, mainly the FMCG giants who spend hundreds of crores annually in advertising, allege that their ad money has been going down the drain as they are unable to target the audiences sharply. Others say the NCCS has become outdated in India. The Indian Society of Advertisers has even written to BARC requesting the council to implement the ISEC. BARC is also currently evaluating the ISEC.
NCCS relies on the education of the “primary wage earner” and “consumer durables” in households. Advertisers say possession of consumer durables is no longer a determinant of a consumer’s affluence level and their buying behaviour.
On the other hand, ISEC considers the occupation of the “primary earner” and the educational attainment of both the “most educated male and female adults” in the households. ISEC is being viewed as a superior system as it plots cohorts in a long pyramid form while the NCCS buckets most of the consumers in top 3 categories with no clear discrimination.
“MRSI recently conducted a comparative study on NCCS and ISEC panels. When the chief wage earner’s education and consumer durables were used as determinants, over 60 per cent of households got bucketed into just three categories A, B & C. In ISEC, the similar category level contributes to merely 15 per cent of the households,” a marketer told e4m on the condition of anonymity.
“The impact of not having the IRS for the last four years has resulted in marketers having to make blind choices. While one can argue that print is not as dynamic as TV or other channels of communication, COVID has changed the print consumption landscape too,” a publisher said, requesting anonymity.
The IRS, jointly published by the MRUC and Readership Studies Council of India (RSCI), is the world’s largest continuous study with an annual sample size exceeding 2.56 lakh respondents.
The survey gives a snapshot of India’s Print and other media consumption, demographics, product ownership and usage. The IRS also covers over 100 product categories in the households surveyed.
