MUMBAI: An oversight committee appointed by the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India, to review its data validation and outlier policy has determined the
current process emplyed by India’s sole television measurement company as “accurate and unbiased”.
The two-member committee led by Nakul Chopra and Praveen Tripathi conducted an extensive review of the entire process and presented a very detailed assessment of the ongoing practice to the BARC board.
The committee stated that the current process is accurate and unbiased and recommended BARC India to continue to follow the process as it is. According to the committee, there is no manual intervention in the process for treating outliers. The entire process is driven by robust algorithms and rules which makes the process unbiased. This is applied to all channels in a fair manner which in return helps BARC India give transparent and reliable data to its subscribers. Over the last 4 years this process has been enhanced and made more robust. New learnings and increased automation has been incorporated with every change. The committee is also working closely with BARC India to further automate the identification and treatment of landing page.
As a long term solution, the committee also recommended that BARC India should appoint a permanent oversight committee which acts independently from a maker-checker standpoint. The Board is reviewing the report and will decide on a concrete plan in the near future.
“The oversight committee has successfully submitted its report which should reinforce the faith of industry in the process. We have always ensured the fairness and transparency of all our processes and are proud that the findings of the committee re-affirm the same. We will continue working with the oversight committee and Industry members to improve the measurement standards”, said Punit Goenka, chairman, BARC India.
