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I MAY not be alone when I confess that I’ve had to more or less give up watching local television programming because of what seems to me to be the abysmal standard of content.
But whenever I have raised this reservation with TV people on both the entertainment and news sides, they have silenced me by quoting, primarily, ratings. This is what is popular, they argue, this is the sort of television Pakistanis want to see.
The shows I appreciate least are often the ones that get the highest ratings. The higher the ratings for a show, the higher, generally, the advertising it receives and thus, the higher the revenue it earns.
On Thursday, though, there was an intriguing little news report in the papers: a certain private company has announced a partnership with another company to increase the TV audience measurement service in the country. I am gratified to learn that with the rapid meter technology, data on people’s viewing habits will be collected and delivered using a built-in modem and GPRS connectivity.
But I am even more gratified to learn that this particular company is the national television ratings provider. It introduced electronic overnight TV ratings data in Pakistan in 2007 and its panel initially covered three cities, which has over the years been expanded to nine cities and — get this — 675 households.
Television execs say that they do not depend solely of course on these ‘people-meters’ to gauge what has clicked with the audience. The sources such an estimate can come from include the buzz around a particular show (which is non-empirical data, but not necessarily unreliable) and how much advertising it’s drawing (which is hard data).
Now consider this: a new, local-language newspaper was some years ago seeking to make sweeping inroads into the newspaper-buying market in Pakistan.
Large-circulation newspapers in the country print from a limited number of locations; editions that have been finalised earlier than the absolute, city, deadline (called the dak edition, from the Urdu, meaning ‘mail’) are dispatched to rural/remoter areas (from where the organisation does not publish).
So, for example, a paper might run off its dak edition from Karachi or Lahore by, say, 9 or 10pm, load it on to vans and send it off to be picked up by hawkers in interior Sindh or rural Punjab; the edition that is to be distributed in the city is finalised much later, during the small hours. The more remote an area, the later (broadly speaking) national newspapers will start showing up.
The just-setting-up-shop newspaper decided to adopt a strategy that would circumvent all this tediousness, and invested in printing from nearly a dozen different cities and towns. This meant that even the editions reaching rural/remote areas would have the late news, and the copy would arrive on the doorstep of even shops in the interior bright and early, neatly undercutting the competition.
It should have worked. But it didn’t, because despite the large circulation this paper quickly attracted, it was not getting the advertising that would make this a feasible business model. Notwithstanding the number of copies the paper was selling, advertisers did not consider the newspaper’s buyers a lucrative market (even though it is possible to think of plenty of things that can be advertised in a rural-agricultural economy — particularly when this is the dominant employment sector — albeit not carrying the price-tag of a sports car).
So this is my question: how do advertising executives actually, empirically, know what is popular among the Pakistani audience?
Their offices are located in the larger urban areas, far from the realities and concerns of the overwhelming number of people. They subscribe to a particular demographic experience (urban, educated, English-speaking, middle- to upper-middle class, between say 25 and 45-50 years of age).
With sparse rating data and hardly any real feedback at all from the majority of the 180 million plus population, how do they in their hermetically sealed towers decide what sells?
After all, a man marooned on an island may prefer the bananas to the coconuts found there, for if there aren’t any strawberries he’ll never even discover his predilection for them.
There seems to be great danger in Pakistan’s advertising-reliant media situation that the corporate world is making a top-down guesstimate, supporting through its rupees what it thinks the people ‘out there’ will like — or, worse, what it prefers itself. And they may be getting it quite wrong, leaving audiences to choose between pappy bananas and dry coconuts.
Isn’t it time the media tried to serve up a truly multi-continental menu so that people can explore and identify what they like? For all we know, it might turn out to be like religion: Pakistanis love it, but they’ve never voted for the religious right in any significant numbers.
The writer is a member of staff.
