BARC to soon choose partner for digital measurement

The audience measurement body has now called for RFP (Request for Proposal) for the same.

The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India which had issued the Request for Information (RFI) for digital measurement in December, last year, has received a response from 11 vendors across the globe.

Those who submitted the RFI include Kantar Media, IMRB and ComScore, Nielsen, MediaMetrie, Gracenote, Informate, GFK, Accenture, EY, Eywa Media, Gemius, and Verto Analytics.

To speed up the launch of its digital measurement services this year, BARC India will issue the Request for Proposal (RFP) soon, and the partner for the venture will be announced in a couple of months. With this, the research Council has moved one step closer to providing audience measurement beyond television.

BARC India's intent, through its foray into digital measurement, is to measure total unduplicated audiences through a single source panel, across all devices and platforms, measuring combined programme impressions or advertisements regardless of where and how content/ad is being consumed.

Once the venture takes shape, BARC India will be the first to provide a TV and digital viewership measurement service across the globe. With this, BARC India will cover more than 50 per cent of media spends between TV and digital.

In order to make the service robust and accurate, BARC India will look at partnerships with publishers and content creators in the future.

"A lot of content today is being created for online consumption, but all these impressions are unaccounted for. With our digital measurement, we are looking at providing content creators and platform owners with insights on the consumption behaviour of viewers. We are happy with the response we have received from vendors globally," says BARC India CEO Partho Dasgupta.