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Tag: Paritosh Joshi

  • Sudhanshu Vats to helm Asci in landmark 40th year

    Sudhanshu Vats to helm Asci in landmark 40th year

    MUMBAI: Pidilite Industries managing director Sudhanshu Vats has been elected chairman of the Advertising Standards Council of India (Asci) at its 39th annual general meeting, taking charge as the country’s advertising regulator-by-consensus enters its fourth decade.

    MullenLowe Global chief strategy officer S Subramanyeswar  moves in as vice-chairman, while industry veteran Paritosh Joshi of Provocateur Advisory becomes honorary treasurer.

    Founded in 1985 as a voluntary self-regulatory body, Asci is recognised by the Cable TV Act, Doordarshan, All India Radio and several key regulators. Its consumer complaints committee enjoys extraordinary acceptance for a voluntary code: in FY 2024-25, compliance hit 98 per cent for print advertising, 97 per cent for television and 81 per cent for digital. The supreme court has repeatedly cited Asci’s role in consumer protection.

    Vats said the council’s job has “never been more important” as advertising mutates with technology and new formats. “Our responsibility is to ensure advertising is executed with integrity—centred on the product promise, respectful of the community and mindful of consumers,” he told members. “Self-regulation provides guidance to the industry and assurance to the public. The simple principle is to keep the consumer’s interest front and centre.”

    Outgoing chairman Partha Sinha called his tenure “a comma in a sentence that keeps unfolding”. Over the past years, he said, Asci has “moved from being a watchdog to an enabler of responsible communication—partnering, not just policing,” and stepped “firmly into the digital arena, because responsibility cannot lag behind technology.”

    To mark its fortieth year, the council unveiled an ambitious agenda:

    * AdWise literacy drive – training more than a million schoolchildren to identify, question and evaluate advertising messages, reducing their vulnerability to misleading or harmful pitches.
    * Gen-Alpha research – an ethnographic study of children born into the touchscreen age to craft a framework for responsible advertising to the next generation.
    * New city offices – expansion of Asci’s physical footprint to Bengaluru and Delhi to deepen engagement across India.
    * Legal knowledge hub – a comprehensive online resource on advertising codes and laws, developed with leading law firm Khaitan & Co.
    * Podcast partnerships – a new series with The Logical Indian and Marketing Minds to spread awareness of responsible advertising.
    * Visual commitment badge – a mark members can display in their communications and on websites to signal adherence to the Asci code.

    Asci’s influence has widened well beyond complaint adjudication. The Asci Academy now drives education and thought leadership through masterclasses for marketers, faculty development programmes in media and advertising colleges, and a pre-production advisory service that helps advertisers check compliance before campaigns go live—avoiding costly post-release fixes.

    In recent years the council has published widely cited white papers on dark patterns, artificial intelligence in advertising, the depiction of masculinity and the trust deficit around digital influencers. It has issued pioneering guidelines on influencer conduct, cryptocurrency, green claims and gender stereotyping, earning two global awards for leadership in self-regulation.

    Looking ahead, Vats said Asci will “strengthen global partnerships and knowledge exchange with peer bodies worldwide, and invest in research, innovation and frameworks that respond to the realities of digital-first advertising.”

    For a voluntary body that began as a modest industry code, the next chapter promises to be anything but quiet.

  • Guest column: BARC is ‘Measure For Measure’, not ‘As You Like It’ (Sorry, Shakespeare)

    Guest column: BARC is ‘Measure For Measure’, not ‘As You Like It’ (Sorry, Shakespeare)

    MUMBAI: Nashik of the 1970s wasn’t the energetic city which you may have visited in recent years. It was a bucolic backwater to which retirees from Bombay’s (it was Bombay back then) Parsi and Bohri communities would gravitate. The pervasive pastoral stillness would be punctuated, infrequently, by the ponderous report of field guns from the Regiment of Artillery, still headquartered there, or the whiplash crack of the MiG-21s, test flying from the HAL Ozar plant, as they broke the sound barrier.

    A schoolboy, this schoolboy, in such a town had little fodder to satiate his keen appetite for the novel and interesting. What you, growing up in Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore, would have shrugged off with a dismissive wave, was a source of wonder and delight for him.

    Every once in a while, there would be a clutch of no more than three or four people walking purposefully along one of the main thoroughfares, one of them bearing a sturdy wooden tripod, topped off with rather elaborate apparatus. They would stop; the tripod unfolded and placed carefully, with a bloke checking a spirit level for the horizontal; caps taken off a little telescope which was the business end of the wondrous thing; and even as one of the team members scurried off into the distance with a pennant, the senior chap would begin to peer intently through the eyepiece of the telescope and start recording – I had no idea what – in his little notebook.

    If you still haven’t figured out what I allude to, it’s called a theodolite. Used by surveyors for creating detailed maps over large areas. In effect, the theodolite is really an instrument to measure length, which in this special case should correctly be labelled distance.

    Even as these wonders unfolded in the wide open spaces, our science teacher was instructing us about the centrality of measurement in the Physics lab. We were introduced to the metric and imperial systems and got a chance to use various instruments which enabled precise measurements, even of really small units. While everyone had a pocket ruler marked off in millimetres, any smaller length or width was beyond its abilities. The micrometre screw gauge was a near miraculous tool for a schoolboy. Who would have thought that one could measure the thickness of a sheet of paper? Or aluminium foil? And there it was, doing exactly that.

    I had learned, that quiet morning in a Deolali laboratory, that it was as important to measure the minuscule as it was to measure the colossal. A theodolite could measure the height of Mt Everest but it would be of little use if the task was to measure the diameter of a needle or a shirt length from a bolt of fine cotton. That measurement was not a one-size-fits-all activity.

    Sadly, four decades later, we are attempting to use a metre rule to measure a hair’s breadth.

    The BARC audience measurement system is designed to measure “What India Watches.” In an accurate analogy, the task involves measuring both the gargantuan (top Hindi entertainment channel with 1.3 billion impressions) and the minuscule (English news channel with 600,000 impressions). If the English news channel was the thickness of a typical sheet of paper, the Hindi entertainment channel would be thicker than four reams of 500 sheets each. Indeed, the entire English news genre with 2.7 million impressions would amount to just over four sheets, against over 2,000 for the single Hindi entertainment channel.

    Read more news on BARC

    You should be able to see, now, that BARC’s measurement is already able to span the range of measurements from a virtual micrometre gauge to a virtual metre rule. People who complain that BARC is unequal to its assigned task should know that this is quite unlike anything that similar systems in other jurisdictions are designed to do.

    Consider a tiny market like Serbia, population seven million, which Nielsen Audience Measurement (Serbia) tracks with 880 metered homes. For comparison, Hyderabad, India’s fourth most populous urban agglomeration, is about seven million too. Serbia has 120 metered homes per million population. At a similar metering density, BARC would have to metre over 56,000 metered homes only for urban India (population 471 million).

    Unfortunately, this would not be terribly helpful. Here’s why. Indians currently watch about 250 minutes of TV per day, with a standard deviation of 15 minutes. The standard error of this number, at 160,000 respondents in the panel, is two seconds. If the sample was to double, this would shrink to 1.7 seconds.

    The non-intuitive thing about statistical sampling is this. A doubling of the sample, from its current level, would yield a mere 15 per cent improvement in accuracy. On a number which is already incredibly accurate.

    Ask yourself. Are you a citizen of 185 Serbias? Or ONE INDIA?

    The author is principal at Provocateur Advisory. The opinions expressed here are his own and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.

  • Sun TV: Broadcasting vet Joshi hired on ‘temporary assignment’

    NEW DELHI: Broadcast Audience Research Council (India)’s former tech-com member and industry veteran Paritosh Joshi has joined the Chennai-based Sun TV Network to oversee and drive the revenue growth prospect of the Network Channels across four south Indian languages Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

    Although Joshi denied having ‘joined’ Sun TV while talking to www.indiantelevision.com, Sun TV sources told this media portal that Joshi, who has helped the growth of several channels, has joined on a temporary assignment.

    His last assignment was with India TV as the CEO till August 2016. In this new assignment, he will be working towards increasing the revenue generation capabilities of the network channels.

    Sun TV has 34 channels including news and non-news channels. Paritosh is expected to function as a Strategic consultant who will be guiding both GEC and Non GEC network channel’s sales teams towards better realisation of revenues.

    Joshi has vast experience of more than three decades in Brand Portfolio, Advertising, Media & Broadcast sector in Indian and South Asia. He also specialised in Consumer Product and Service Sales and Marketing, Business Negotiation, Team leadership and motivation, Goal setting and budgeting, Vision articulation.

    He has been associated with Shop CJ, Star India, Business Standard, ITC Limited, Lintas India and P&G. He also plays mentoring and advisory role in MRUC and served for Indian Broadcasting Foundation.

    An alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad with graduation in Statistics and Mathematics, he was among those who helped the roll-out of BARC India and took part in several workshops all over the country to familiarize the media and the TV industry with its work.

  • Is VoD biz making money or it’s still investing?

    MUMBAI: Beyond the hype, what are the ground realities of earning revenue? Or, is it still all about investing in content and infrastructure? When’s the likely inflection point when businesses could start to look at break-even?

    Trying to answer these questions at the CASBAA OTT Summit 2017 were — AltDigital CEO Nachiket Pantvaidya, SonyLiv EVP and digital head Uday Sodhi and GroupM South Asia chief growth officer Lakshmi Narasimhan.

    Evaluating the OTT space and enumerating on the best business model, the moderator for the evening — Provocateur Advisory principal Paritosh Joshi — asked the head of the recently launched (soft) AltBalaji app about the mantra to grab maximum eyeballs in the OTT space.

    Answering the doubt, Pantvaidya said, “India is a large market and the idea with AltBalaji is to connect with the 50-70 million people which correspond to e-commerce or functional 3G. There is also a market outside India of approximately 70 million people who want content. I think it is a library game. For SVoD to take off, content and habit formation among the people is crucial — our platform has content ranging from sublime to ridiculous. As Sameer (Nair, Balaji Telefims CEO) said, we are here to capture the market space between Narcos and Naagin.”

    Taking cue from Pantvaidya’s point, Sodhi added, “The consumer is sorted in its head about what he wants. There is a clear habit formation. They are consuming on the go. There is a difference in the watch-time and they are coming back to watch linearly same shows. Habit formation is happening.”

    India’s online video space will predominantly be an advertising led video-on-demand (AVOD) market even though subscription led VoD shows higher growth on a low base. If the digital eco-system becomes a SVoD dominated market, will that mean no business or loss for the advertising agencies? “There has been a pricing mistake in the last three years. The platforms come with a point of view that it will surpass television. The consumers think of these platforms as channels providing content. The players have to price it that way. In the US, OTT outstrips payTV in terms of subscribers but its annual revenues are lower,” added Narasimhan.

    Pantvaidya added, “There is lack of development in the appreciable distribution system. It can survive when there is subscription. You can share profits with them if you are a SVoD. With free content comes carriage fees.

    Further, Sodhi believes that its early days for everyone and there is no model which has been cast and stoned yet. He segregated the entire process into three phases. The phase one is when you throw content. In the second phase, people start coming to your platform and your focus is o retain them. Money making only comes in the third level. Citing examples of the three existing models in the world, YouTube, which is 100 per cent advertising, Netflix, SVoD based platform and Apple which is transnational pay-per-view platform. “All these platforms are fairly growing, and have reached this point after 15 years. They have come out of their strengths to build a model,” said Sodhi.

    Narasimhan opined that the AVoD services in the OTT space have not been explored yet. He also said that data from servers indicate that kids,youth and top-end consumers are moving to digital from TV which clearly shows that the eco-system is evolving in India.

    Joshi posted a question at the panelists asking whether they are underestimating the willingness of the consumers to pay for content. Pantvaidya agreed to his point, and said, “Scale and volume is necessary for spending. One should have faith in their content for it to sell.”

    Sodhi added, “There is room for so many things. Everything is falling into its right place. The run-away is getting shorter before the take-off.”

    OTT services are exploding in India and the business is more likely to be advertising-led in the short term. The OTT sector has clearly become a space to watch out for as the infrastructure continues to improve, devices get smarter and data prices fall. Let’s see what the future holds for these players.

  • Paritosh Joshi quits India TV

    Paritosh Joshi quits India TV

    MUMBAI: Paritosh Joshi has decided to step down as the CEO of India TV. he joined India TV on 2 November 2015.

    Ritu Dhawan, managing Director said “Paritosh joined us in November, 2015 and while we hoped that this would be a long association, it has clearly proven taxing for him as he continues to commute between two metros. He has now chosen to return to his family in Mumbai. It was a pleasure having him on board and we wish him well with his future endeavours.”

    Paritosh Joshi said it was indeed a pleasure working with brand India TV and,” though, we could not continue for longer duration due to my personal obligations, I wish Brand India TV many more land marks to achieve.”

  • Paritosh Joshi quits India TV

    Paritosh Joshi quits India TV

    MUMBAI: Paritosh Joshi has decided to step down as the CEO of India TV. he joined India TV on 2 November 2015.

    Ritu Dhawan, managing Director said “Paritosh joined us in November, 2015 and while we hoped that this would be a long association, it has clearly proven taxing for him as he continues to commute between two metros. He has now chosen to return to his family in Mumbai. It was a pleasure having him on board and we wish him well with his future endeavours.”

    Paritosh Joshi said it was indeed a pleasure working with brand India TV and,” though, we could not continue for longer duration due to my personal obligations, I wish Brand India TV many more land marks to achieve.”

  • India TV ropes in Paritosh Joshi as CEO

    India TV ropes in Paritosh Joshi as CEO

    MUMBAI: India TV has appointed Paritosh Joshi as its new CEO. Joshi has been a ‘strategist’ for the news channel since 2012 and was tasked with optimising and leading the revenue function of the company’s existing businesses and also develop business for its forthcoming ventures.

     

    Joshi’s last assignment was as Star CJ Network CEO.

     

    At India TV, the CEO post was until now held by India TV managing director Ritu Dhawan, who was given the additional portfolio in 2009 post a restructuring exercise.

     

    Dhawan said, “Paritosh has been part of India TV family for well over three years. Its is a pleasure to welcome him home.”

     

    Joshi added,”I have been privileged to work alongside the terrific team here for several years and when Ritu asked me to take up this responsibility, it seemed like a natural next step.”

     

    Joshi joined Star TV in August 2005 as president, advertising sales and distribution. In 2009, he was made CEO of Star CJ Network India, which was a joint venture of Star Television and South Korea’s CJ O Shopping. He quit Star CJ Network in April 2012 and has since been working on a number of industry initiatives including the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India.

     

    Apart from being a strategist at India TV, Joshi was also strategic advisor to the Shailesh Kapoor helmed Ormax Media.

     

    Joshi, who was until recently Media Research Users Council (MRUC) chairman of the Technical Committee, now serves as mentor for the council.

  • MRUC elects Ushodaya Enterprises director I Venkat as chairman

    MRUC elects Ushodaya Enterprises director I Venkat as chairman

    MUMBAI: Ushodaya Enterprises director I Venkat has been elected as the chairman of Media Research Users Council (MRUC) for a period of two years.

     

    Venkat will replace GroupM South Asia CEO CVL Srinivas.

     

    The decision was taken by MRUC board of directors at its 21st annual general meeting held on 25 September, 2015.

     

    Additionally, HDFC Life senior executive vice president Sanjay Tripathy has taken over from Multi Screen Media president Rohit Gupta as the new MRUC vice chairman.

     

    MRUC CEO Shaswati Saradar has decided to move on after handling the Council for a span of five years and Radhesh Uchil has been nominated as the new MRUC CEO.

     

    DDB Mudra Group executive director N P Sathyamurthy, who earlier headed the Marketing Committee as the chairman, has replaced Paritosh Joshi as chairman of the Technical Committee. 

     

    Spatial Access CEO Nikhil Rangnekar has been named as the new chairman of the Marketing Committee. 

     

    Srinivas and Joshi will serve as mentors for the Council.

  • BARC India to conduct roadshows in February

    BARC India to conduct roadshows in February

    MUMBAI: The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) is all set for 2015, as it will hold roadshows in February on the GUI (Graphical User Interface) in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Bengaluru.

    It was in 2013 when the Council held its first round of roadshows that aimed at sharing the latest updates from BARC with all constituents across the entire broadcast value chain, and, equally important, to receive feedback and suggestions, so that the new television measurement system is completely robust, transparent and representative.

    Welcoming the New Year, the council thanked its stakeholders, vendors, partners and associates as well as highlighted its achievements. With more than 275 channels having ordered for embedders, all major networks in each region and across genres are now on-board.

    As it continues to reach out to the stakeholders for feedback, the playout monitoring facilities are in action and meta-tagging of content across watermarked channels is in full throttle in Mumbai and Bengaluru.

    It has also tested the end-to-end integration of the system, which is working perfectly fine. The technology handshakes are in place and ratings are being generated from the BARC system now.

    In continuation to unravel the puzzle of TV audience measurement system in India, BARC India shared a few learnings and insights on the importance of Relative Errors and Confidence Levels in audience measurement for new beginnings.

    BARC India and the importance of Relative Error

    Over the past few months, BARC India has highlighted its commitment to data robustness and has spoken about lower Relative Errors at high Confidence Levels. It has repeatedly highlighted that Relative Errors are an important factor to be considered whenever it evaluated the ratings data, or read any research report, for that matter.

    Relative Error and its impact on research data

    It is not possible to sample every individual (except perhaps, a Census); hence, sample surveys are undertaken. Statistics offer scientific methods to estimate phenomena across entire population by studying samples. Any sample survey suffers inherently from various errors. Owing to these, statistics never talk about an average (or mean) without talking simultaneously about a measure of dispersion, usually the standard deviation.

    A researcher has to balance between demands of greater accuracy and constraints of finite resources. Statisticians therefore work with defined ‘Confidence Intervals’ and ‘Sampling Errors’. One of these sampling errors is the ‘Relative Error’, or the deviation (in percentage) of the observed value from the actual (expected) value.

    Confidence Level (or Confidence Interval)

    Confidence Level is generally defined as a percentage or a decimal figure less than one. So, if a researcher says that the Confidence Interval is 90 per cent, what he means is that 90 per cent of the samples of the same size taken from the same population will produce results within a defined range.

    Relative Error

    A TV ratings measurement system estimates that the programme has 1 TRP with a standard deviation of 0.25. This means that the actual rating is expected to lie between 1-0.25 and 1+0.25 or 0.75 and 1.25. The relative error is simply 0.25/1.0 or 25 per cent.

     A simplistic explanation that may antagonise a purist, but can be explained simply in the diagram below:

    In other words, it is important for a research to ensure least possible Relative Error at the highest possible Confidence Level; else it risks generating data with such wide variance that it becomes meaningless. Just imagine saying that a programme has 1 TRP at the above Relative Errors.

    Factors affecting Relative Error

    The most important factor that affects Relative Error is sample size. Relative Error increases in geometric magnitude as sample size decreases, while it becomes independent of sample size beyond a certain threshold.

    Sampling is also relatively simpler when estimating a homogenous population and more complex for heterogeneous population. It is hence extremely important to have a significantly large sample size, especially when calculating estimates for large heterogeneous universe.

    On how BARC India intends to handle issues related to sample size to ensure robustness of data, the council shares a hypothetical scenario – A planner wishes to evaluate programme viewership for the following TG for a premium brand – males, NCCS AB, 40+ in Delhi

    Total Sample Size: 130

    Approx. sample size for a programme with a rating of 1 per cent viewers: 13

     A sample size of 13 is way too low to do any meaningful evaluation. Hence, BARC India would not encourage such evaluations.

     To circumvent this issue, BARC India intends to aggregate the data through one of the following means:

    •        Aggregate viewership data across two or more weeks

    •        Add more cities to the sample, aggregating geographically

    •        Instead of considering a particular individual programme or a limited time, evaluate a day part, thus aggregating by time bands

    Each of the above methods would increase the sample size and would allow the planner to make his decision based on robust relevant data. The BARC India Technical Committee is evaluating options of either hardcoding the aggregations in the pre-publishing stage itself, or allowing the planner to decide the aggregation based on his/her requirements. This decision would be taken only after seeing the data for all panel homes and assessing the pros and cons of each method.

  • Television and online medium need different approach for revenue making

    Television and online medium need different approach for revenue making

    NOIDA: The news television space is burdened with cash crunch. And addressing this core issue were the news industry giants at the 7th News Television Summit organised by indiantelevision.com. The Summit which began with a session on ‘Content monetisation through conventional and digital platforms of news channel’ was moderated by Provocateur Advisory principal Paritosh Joshi and attended by NDTV Group CEO Vikram Chandra, TV Today Network CEO Ashish Bagga, IBN18 Network CEO Avinash Kaul, Doordarshan ADG news Mayank Agarwal and Focus News Network group CEO Neeraj Sanan.

     

    Joshi began the session by asking Chandra how viewership data has changed since NDTV raised its voice against the alleged faulty ratings three years ago. Chandra said that they weren’t getting correct ratings and when they talked about it to others they were told to either swim with the tide or do something different which would get the TRPs. Soon after, they were joined by other broadcasters as well.

     

    Joshi then asked Bagga the secret behind Aaj Tak’s dominance in the genre for the last 10 years. Bagga highlighted that it was not easy to sustain its position given the tough environment. “There was reluctance from various quarters so it was necessary to push that credibility,” he said. He added that the network had grown 25 per cent since last year and while others were growing at just two to five per cent.

     

    Talking about the ad rates, Bagga said that the price for a slot on news channels, unlike the GECs is pitiable. However, TV Today has put its business on a sustainable model of 20 per cent y-o-y growth. “This has been done by quality, resource, building perception and getting the required numbers,” he said.

     

    Doordarshan, on being asked about its transformation, said that it had done a good revamp to maintain norms and standards. “People may feel that we put out the news stories a little later than the others, but that’s not the case. We are alert,” said Agrawal.

     

    He however agreed that a lot is still left to be done apart from the new programmes and the new look it has given to its anchors. “We have also set up new teams in order to cover news better and are also focusing on our online medium,” informed Agrawal.  

     

    Joshi also highlighted the fact that there is little differentiation in content between the news channels. Disagreeing with the observation, Kaul said that though it could be true, the approach of each channel for a story is different. “You can cater the news to different age groups and segment it differently,” he opined.

     

    Kaul is optimistic about the new rating system that will be brought out by BARC India. “This will bring in change to the type of content being produced,” he said.

     

    Joshi also brought out the common criticism that the news industry has to deal with. “Various quarters have said that while the news broadcasters crib about the bad business, the genre still sees new players getting into it every now and then. Is it the political money that is going into it?” questioned Joshi.

     

     Sanan at this point said that the reason for this was the fact that people see a lot of potential in news because of its ever growing consumption. “If all news channels give same content then that means there is a need for someone to come and stand out. If people are willing to pay and if you can package your content well then there is no reason why one cannot get into it,” he said.

     

    While digital is a growing platform, Joshi asked whether the algorithm that it follows is trustworthy with regards to journalism. Chandra highlighted the fact that even today the brand of an anchor is important. “When people come to the online medium, they want to come to trustworthy sources rather than a layman giving information,” he opined.

     

    Kaul said that with BARC India bringing in meters in the rural areas, the genre will have to strengthen its coverage in those areas as well. “With 4G and broadband making in-roads, we will be in a better state,” he said.

     

    Chandra stated that it was not right to replicate the TV business model for online and that digital was growing at a CAGR of 40 per cent.