Click to play videoNew Delhi: With about 280 radio stations across 91 cities, advertisers want to know who is tuning in and the Indian radio industry is all set to get into the numbers game as it adopts the globally excepted 'listenership montioring mechanism'.
The Asia Pacific director of Radio for Nielson Media Research, Mark Neely, is in India to tune the Indian market to an accurate listnership system.
Diary Methodology is the globally accepted radio audience measurement system and is uses a more advanced methodology than the ILT or the Indian Listeners Track system, currenlty followed.
"That system does not have indepth logitude information about how people tune in across the week. But as the industry grows in complexity with more stations, we need better system to reflect all channel changes," says Neely.
Unlike ILT, Dairy Methodology records listenership on a weekly basis on the lines of television rating poits or TRP's .
This system is being used in all the developed markets like the US, UK and Australia. In India this methodology is set to come into action at the start of 2007, and will intially cover the top six metros with a sample of 1,000 respondents in each city.
Accurate listenership data will help separate the men from the boys and just like TRP's for TV, advertisers will tune in or out of a radio station based on the numbers.
Currently radio makes up only three per cent of the total advertising pie, but with the current boom and more accurate measurement system, radio's ad share is set to at least double in about a years time.
Says COO, BIG 92.7 FM, Tarun Katial, "Most advertisers without knowing what radio is delivering to them, are not willing to put their buck of the ad-pie on radio. So any measurement would do good for the medium."
And more measurement systems are in the pipeline. A watch meter or an electronic way to measure listenership is already in use could see a global roll out in another 12-24 months.
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