What are TV Channels Waiting For?
Who will set the actual trend for monetization of Pakistani TV content on Digital and Social Media platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Instagram,Tiktok?
Who will dare to sell digital or social audiences as per their physcographics along with demographics, location targeting based floor price varry from USD 5CPM to USD 50 CPM?
Pakistan TV audiences have shrunk over 50% in the last 10 years as TV audiences have shifted to social and digital media platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and others. Same TV content whether sports, entertainment, music, news, lifestyle all are now being consumed via mobile phone.
Read more: Pakistan Launches Bold Step Toward Regulating Digital Assets
Surprisingly TV audiences shrank and shifted to mobile phones but TV media advertising spend has increased. TV channels do ask for higher sponsorship and commercial air time rates. On the other end TV channels alike newspapers follow same conventional tactics and do stop live webcast of entertainment content prime time dramas and upload it after a few hours so they keep advertisers in DejaVu that fresh episodes on TV still have a great number of audience.
Same case was with print media in Pakistan, epaper was uploaded after good 8 hours so physical copies get sold which diverts attention to another pandora box of circulation numbers. There is an organisation called ABC-Audit Bureau of Circulation which determines newspaper rankings on number of copies printed daily in Pakistan.
I believe they did their survey decades ago and leading dailies are still no 1 as per their record but reality is they don’t print even 5000 copies of their newspaper daily but do get advertising rates of 80000 copies per day from Government as well as from MNCs. We all know what are their merits to get billions of rupees advertising from Government. When you look at TV channels you find similarities too as TRPs are of very small sample size but they are good enough to sell the reach and share of voice “munjun” to multinational companies by media buying houses.
What surprised me more is that TV channels content are being consumed on social and digital by over 100 million users in Pakistan and that can be tracked, targeted, verified and even the whole journey from viewing advertisements to purchase/conversion can be monitored by applying tools and AI. with an authentic audience and their confirmed data including Psychographics i.e. the study of consumers based on their psychological characteristics, such as attitudes, interests, opinions, values, and lifestyles. It’s often used in marketing to understand and segment target audiences, going beyond basic demographics like age and income. By understanding these psychological attributes, businesses can tailor their marketing messages and strategies to resonate with specific consumer groups.
Despite availability of confirmed audience targeting with location even pin pointing their product or service is available in respective audience area or online delivery, multinational companies had failed to utilize content on Youtube, Facebook or other platforms whereas TV Channels are losing advertising revenue from these high involvement content like drama episodes which has 100% affinity projection as audience or single user has chosen him/herself that Content to view.
TV Channels are also following Google or Facebook as Gods and whatever they say is to be followed “truck ki batti” as their algorithms mantra never ends and at the end of the day TV channels are happy to get USD 100k monthly revenue from YouTube whereas they can earn USD 1 million monthly from the same content and audiences.
Pakistani TV Content proper monetization on social and digital media can bring advertising revenue more than of what TV, Print , Outdoor together can generate annually. I hope some professionals explore In-stream and In-content advertising seriously with floor price from USD 5 CPM to USD 50 CPM based on audience/consumer group profile.
TV Channels who will adapt this first will make most from Social and Digital media platforms advertising period.
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the media channel. All content is published for informational purposes only.
