Mumbai: Some 13 years after it was founded, the Media Research Users Council (MRUC), a non-profit body that conducts and validates media research, may finally be headed for a rapprochement with the Indian Newspaper Society (INS), the representative body of print media in the country.
If so, it could have significant impact on the relevance and importance of the two rival readership surveys conducted in India to measure newspaper and magazine readers. Such surveys are then used by advertisers as a basis for their spending and by the newspapers and magazines themselves for bragging rights as well as setting ad rates.
INS has now asked for the inclusion of six of its representatives in MRUC’s print technical committee, which monitors the council’s readership surveys.
There are two competing readership surveys in India, MRUC’s Indian Readership Survey (IRS) and the National Readership Survey (NRS) conducted by the National Readership Studies Council (NRSC), which is run by representatives from the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI), the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), a body of advertisers and media companies that oversees circulation audits, and INS itself.
MRUC was founded in 1994 to address a growing feeling among advertisers that it did not make sense to only go by a readership survey that was partly controlled by print media companies and concerns about the validity of some of the data.
As a result, relations between MRUC and INS have been strained in the past, usually over the findings of IRS.
INS’ newfound interest in MRUC is being seen by some media experts as a sign of the print media body’s growing disillusionment with NRS. INS has, until now, supported and funded NRS.
However, last year, several companies that are part of INS believed there were discrepancies in NRS numbers. NRS eventually had to publish the corrected numbers. The NRS survey has been conducted by research firm ACNielsen ORG-MARG Pvt. Ltd for the past few years.
“The IRS could emerge as the credible (and) accepted currency for print readership and in the long term this could have an impact on the funding of NRS and the possibility of INS pulling out of the NRSC,” said a media expert familiar with the development, who did not wish to be identified.
“Till some time back, the INS was not even willing to recognize the MRUC. But the NRS, backed by the INS, has come under such criticism in recent times that the INS could be looking to shift loyalties. Why back and fund research that most people don’t want to buy?” asked the head of a print media company, who did not wish to be identified.
The six INS representatives being suggested for the MRUC committee are Gargi Ojha from The Statesman Ltd, Rahul Kansal from Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd, Pralay Nanda from Lokmat Group, Pankaj Jha from HT Media Ltd (which also publishes Mint), Ravi Shankar from Dinamalar Publications Ltd and Peter Suresh from Dainik Bhaskar Group.
