On January 1, MBC, a regional television broadcasting powerhouse, began a partnership with Saudi Arabia’s TAM project. TAM stands for TV Audience Measurement, and is a system for monitoring what people are watching.
Since May 2024 it has collected data from a representative panel of just over 9,000 people in 2,150 households – not just what they are watching on terrestrial television, but what they are streaming and viewing online as well.
MBC’s participation is an important endorsement from the largest television company in the Arab world. It came after Saudi’s General Authority for Media Regulation announced KSA TAM would be the official national benchmark for audience measurement in the kingdom.
The project will make it easier to see who is watching what, when they are watching it, and on what screens. This allows advertisers to plan, target and measure their messaging accordingly.
The GCC has a long and fraught history of trying to introduce people meters (as measurement systems such as TAM are known in the industry).
Getting people meters get off the ground, with buy-in from giants such as MBC, is a big achievement. However, changes in media consumption mean TAM is not the holy grail it once was.
People meters are devices that can tell what station is being watched on a TV set at any time. They are installed in homes that volunteer to be part of a representative panel, so the data from the meters can be extrapolated to paint a picture of the larger population.
Households are incentivised to have people meters installed and to provide extra information such as who is in the room when the television set is on.
In the absence of people meters up to now, television viewing has largely been measured by a system called CATI – computer-aided telephone interviews – or by asking people to keep a diary of their viewing habits.
Using CATI, a call centre will contact households and ask the person who answers the phone questions about who they are (age, gender, income bracket, etc.) and what they watched the night before.
Both CATI and viewing diaries tend to favour big broadcasters such as MBC, as people are more likely to recall, or default to saying, that they watched something on one of the most popular channels.
These methods can’t measure channel-surfing well, meaning those five minutes you spent watching a minor channel are ignored, since you then watched a blockbuster film or mainstream show, and recorded that as the only TV you consumed last night.
Streaming services, of course, know what you were watching. And, assuming you used your own log-in and user ID, they know which member of the household picked the show.
Despite more than 20 years of discussions and abortive attempts, people meters were never introduced in the UAE, the region’s most progressive media market.
The reasons for this are many.
Who will pay for people meters? There has been little incentive for big broadcasters to pay for a measurement that is likely to lower their measured share of audience. And the small broadcasters that would benefit from more granular data don’t have such big budgets. (One way to raise their revenue is to prove to advertisers that more people are watching their shows, but to do that they need data, for which they need people meters.)
There has been an understandable cultural reluctance to have a monitoring device sitting in people’s living rooms. Especially in the conservative GCC. People meters can’t literally see people, but the optics aren’t good.
Even now there are limitations. People meters still can’t tell exactly who is watching. There may be settings to say which member of the household is in front of the TV, but these are self-reported and therefore prone to shortcuts and errors. And they can’t tell how people are watching. Is the TV on in the background while people mill in and out of the room, having their own conversations? Or is a viewer glued to it intently?
What can’t be measured can’t be managed, although media planners seem to have got by up till now. But perhaps more knowledge about who is watching television will help slow the migration of advertising spend from TV to digital, which has long been much more trackable.
People meters have been a long time coming to the region. And now they are here, just as people migrate in droves to streaming services and online viewing. But we may finally find out what was on TV last night.
Austyn Allison is an editorial consultant and journalist who has covered Middle East advertising since 2007
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