BENGALURU: For the eighth week in row, FMCG major Hindustan Lever Limited (Lever) was the top television advertiser in terms of advertisement insertions per week for weeks 1 to 8 of 2017 (Saturday, 30 December 2016 to Friday, 24 February 2017) as per Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) data.

This paper must be read with a caveat: It deals only with the players present in BARC’s top 10 lists of advertisers and brands. The sums/percentages of other genres/players’ advertisements, other than those indicated in BARC’s top 10 lists of brands and advertisers, have not been considered/mentioned in this paper during the period under consideration and their total numbers/percentages could be more/higher during the period under consideration in this paper.

Analysis of BARC data for Top 10 Advertisers Across Genre: All India (U+R): 4+ Individualsfor weeks 1 to 8 of 2017 shows that of the total number of 25,52,678 television ad insertions (insertions or spots),  Lever had as many as 8,36,171 insertions (about a third). FMCG players Reckitt Benckiser (India) Limited (Reckitt) and Baba Ramdev’sPatanjaliAyurved Limited (Patanjali) had the second and third most ad spots respectively.  

Please refer to Fig A1 below for details of the other players and genres.

Seventeen advertisers were in the list of top 10 advertisers for weeks 1 to 8 of 2017. Of the seventeen advertisers, 14 were from the FMCG genre, while there was one each was from the Music (Super Cassettes Industries); Online (Amazon Online India Pvt Ltd); and Politics (Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP) genres. Five FMCG players – three of those mentioned above, Cadbury’s India Limited (Cadbury’s) and Procter & Gamble (P&G) were in the list of the biggest television advertisers across all the eight weeks. Of the non-FMCG players, Super Cassettes was in the list of the biggest advertisers for six weeks (including week 8), while Amazon and the BJP were in the biggest advertisers list for 2 weeks each.

Four genres were the biggest advertisers as per the BARC list for top 10 advertisers in terms of insertions. Please refer to Fig A2 below:

Analysis of Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) data for Top 10 Brands Across Genre: All India (U+R): 4+ Individuals, shows that forty-two brands occupied the 80 slotsfor top 10 brands that had the highest ad insertions per week spots during weeks 1 to 8 of 2017.

During the first eight weeks of this fiscal, the BJP was the top brand in terms of ad insertions with 63,530 spots across the 4 weeks while it was in the top 10 brand list. Though Lever’s detergent powder brand Surf Excel was in the list of brands with highest number of insertions for 5 weeks, it had only 31,436 ad spots while in the top 10 list. Please refer to Fig B1 below for list of top television advertising brands for weeks 1 to 8 of 2017.

It may be noted that Genre 1 in the figure below is a split of genres to sub-genres, Genre 2 is genres with a broader classification.The Phone genre in Fig B2 below has been further sub-classified by the author as Mobile Phone (phone and data instruments), Mobile Bank or Mobile Wallet (Airtel Payments Bank), Phones Services (Service from phone service providers such as Airtel, Vodafone, Idea,etc) and Phone apps (such as Amazon Video, Jio Digital Life, etc.) in Fig B1 below – Genre 1. Government has been further sub-classified as Government and Association below in Genre 1.

Nineteen FMCG brands were present in the top 10 lists of brands in terms of brand insertions for weeks 1 to 8 of 2017. Please refer to Fig B2 below for the genres (Genre 2) that were present in the top 10 lists during the period,