On the TV track with tview

The UAE ratings agency Tview has announced debut audit results, and while the ratings system is working, there’s still room for improvement. Chris Newbould wades through mounds of statistics to bring us the essentials.

Family in living room with remote control and flat screen television (iStockphoto.com)

Tview, the official TV ratings agency for the UAE, has been operating across the region for just over a year now through its network of people meters randomly installed in homes in all seven emirates.

Essentially a local equivalent to Nielsen or BARB, the system is the first of its kind here and was created at the behest of the TV channels to know what audiences are watching; the advertisers, who want to know when best to advertise to whom; and the producers, who can use the information to inform their future projects.

Tview’s first audit, carried out by the French specialists CESP, is out. The good news is that CESP concluded that “no integrity issues” were identified and that the audience monitoring process and results it generated were “proactive and transparent”.

Olivier Daufresne, CESP’s international projects manager, talks about how challenging it can be to set up a system in a region that’s never had the equivalent before.

Privacy

Privacy was a big issue for many panel members. The audit found that 26 per cent of TVs in monitored households were not actually being monitored and Daufresne noted that many of these were in bedrooms. While the conservative Gulf culture undoubtedly explains why some panelists would not want the sanctity of their bedrooms invaded, Daufresne adds that for many expatriate Arabs there may be more of a political basis: “If you come from a country where the government has historically sought to control every part of your life, the idea of monitoring equipment in the bedroom is just too Big Brother,” he says.

Panelists turnover

In a country with a population of around 85 per cent expats, panelists come and go on a fairly regular basis. In fact, the local ratings system turns panelists round at an annual rate of 26 per cent – double the international norm. Daufresne adds that another reason for the high rate is the newness of the system – almost 30 per cent of people initially interviewed about taking a people meter agreed to do so, much higher than global averages.

Number of channels

While many markets have a code built into a channel’s programming to tell people meters what viewers are watching, the number of channels in the Middle East – more than 800 and rising – make this impossible. Tview’s meters take actual audio samples from what is being viewed, which are then meticulously matched up to a channel’s schedule information.

Large families

People metering first originated in the West, where it is no longer the norm for different generations of families to continue to live in the same house after marriage. Here in the Gulf, of course, four or more generations can easily be found in the same family home, so the eight-person limit on the number of people who can input their demographics into the monitor is not ideal.

Setting up a panel

According to auditors, door-to-door interviews at randomly selected addresses are considered by statisticians to be the best way of selecting a panel. In a region with no recognised home address system, where it’s not culturally acceptable to knock on a stranger’s door, this presented challenges to the Tview team. Tview initially used random street interviews, but on CESP’s advice will now be moving to randomly selected phone numbers.