Landing pages curb: Advertisers see cleaner planning, stronger ad-rate leverage

New Delhi: Marketers have welcomed the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s (MIB) proposal to exclude landing-page minutes from TV ratings. They say cleaner data will steady media planning and strengthen rate negotiations.

In draft changes to the TRP guidelines, the MIB has proposed excluding viewership from landing pages from official ratings to ensure a level playing field and remove inflation from default tune-ins. Landing pages may continue only as a marketing tool, but any audience data from them will be kept out of measurement.

Also read: Who killed landing pages?

Mayank Shah, Senior Category Head at Parle Products, called the move a fair correction to ensure that ratings reflect genuine audience choice. “When a channel starts and a viewer is not actively selecting it, that default selection is not right. The viewer is not choosing to watch that channel. Some channels are getting inflated numbers simply because of default selections in certain genres, and that’s not okay,” he noted. 

Shah said separating landing-page data from genuine viewership “makes perfect sense.” “If an advertiser pays for landing pages to gain an advantage in ratings, that should be stopped. Landing pages can be used as a marketing tool, but their viewership should be measured separately,” he said. 

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Having said that, he does not foresee major disruption: “From an advertiser’s point of view, this won’t have major implications. But for broadcasters relying heavily on landing page spikes, it will definitely mean a recalibration.”

A senior executive at one of India’s FMCG majors, requesting anonymity, said the amendment “brings more clarity” from an advertiser’s perspective. “Landing page becomes a hyper-node of distribution for the channel. They buy it for a short period of time, and then it disappears. Advertisers don’t plan with real-time data; they plan with past data. So even if a landing page delivers spikes, the advertiser rarely sees that benefit in real time. Removing that noise from data makes the entire system cleaner,” they said.

Also read: Arnab-led NBF hails landing page action, the full circle of Republic’s TRP karma

The executive added that the change would “bring stability to the planning process” since it would reflect only “persistent viewership data that sustains over time.” 

On implementation, they said, “BARC has to negate that. They measure by frequency and know exactly what frequency the landing page is playing at. The watermark used on the landing page can be different, making it easier to track and eliminate from data.” 

Also read: MIB strips landing pages from TRP: Industry debates feasibility and warns of pitfalls

They downplayed the overall impact on advertisers: “Landing pages are not a sustainable option for most channels. These are short-term tactics—blips, not sustained trends. So it won’t dramatically alter media planning, except for channels that have been consistently dependent on them.”

A senior media planner said, “With something like this, I would assume that for a lot of genres, the ratings would come down a bit. They would get corrected. Usually, general entertainment channels tend to stay stable because of their large base. But fringe genres, maybe FTA channels, movies, or news, could see more volatility.” 

As rankings shift, the media planner said, “It changes the rate cards and gives agencies more leverage to negotiate better deals for clients.” 

The exact scale of adjustment will only be clear after rollout. “We’ll know the impact only once implementation starts,” the planner said.