If you look around in your social circle, you may not find TV viewers who haven’t seen politicians shouting and accusing each other. This is the daily story in most current affair shows as well.
A viewer, sacred individual with eyeballs, the loveliest creature for the program producers, the marketers in the channels, for the channels, for the media planners and for the advertisers as well as source of revenue. The TV viewing for the end consumers of entertainment industry is almost free. You can have grand variety of channels and one can pay a small monthly cable fee to have this luxury of home theatre. The variety of entertainment available in approximately 5 Dollars a month to TV viewers is undoubtedly, unmatched across the globe.
The revenue stream for the channels is only through advertising that it gets from variety of advertisers including public and private sectors. There is no concept of subscription and it is not anticipated at all in the near future.
To have maximum advertising revenues the news channels make sure to design talk shows and execute them in a manner to pull maximum. Interestingly television news channels have become the breeding center for most of the controversies and political rivalries. The more vocal the show is and hotter the debate gets, higher it is shown on viewer ship ratings index .After the reshaping and repositioning of News channel in the second quarter of this year when Geo went through tough times and still not widely visible. The other current affair shows have started getting better rankings on viewership chart.
The media plans are usually designed while keeping in view of target consumers of the product. On the basis of gut feelings and filtered data of people’s meter, generally the targeted consumers is caught” red eyed” watching a program x. We can comment that it is assumed or statistically proven to be known and under such estimation, the program “A” is considered to be watched by maximum numbers of targeted consumers for product “B”.
There was a time and maybe it is still the same situation when an ad of a hair removing cream appears in the most popular current affairs or political talk shows. Without being biased about the political wisdom of our female viewers, watching an ad of hair removing cream in political talk shows gives a deep insight regarding viewer ship habits of Pakistani audience.
We may say that all Pakistani adults, urban and rural, males and females are glued to their screens at 10 pm to watch political bull fighting, which is called, current affairs talk show.
The quality of the content within these talk shows and serenity they provide to the minds of the viewers is not the topic here. The most important element is to ensure who is watching which program .If we think that all males and females from all socioeconomic classes love watching political talk shows then spending money during these shows must be giving best ROI. But if not, then we should reconsider our planning strategy.
Author: Maqbool Mirza -about author www.maqboolmirza.com