Indian media company NDTV's lawsuit against Nielsen for TAM, the audience measurement ratings for television in India, and a joint venture of Nielsen and Kantar, is a fascinating long-read: over 192 pages long, it features details of interactions (emails and meetings) between NDTV and TAM, beginning with NDTV's complaints about inaccurate data, and rigging of results, alleging a monopoly in the Indian market, and also that Nielsen promised, but refused to invest in TAM, despite acknowledging issues of rigging and inaccuracy of data, and NDTV, as a client, suffered as a result of this. NDTV claims that the loss of revenue caused to it, "on account of the false, fabricated and manipulated data released to the public by Nielsen, Kantar and TAM over the past eight (8) years is not less than $810 million." The details below are on the basis of a copy of the lawsuit uploaded by Deadline. You can download a copy of the lawsuit here. The first 75-80 pages have most of the information. Why should this lawsuit be of interest to the digital industry? - Firstly, because it indicates that panel data can be gamed, and from a mobile perspective, Nielsen also has a joint venture with Informate which uses panel data. Of course, by no means are we suggesting that that data is being gamed. While NDTV mentions discrepancies between survey data and TAM data, we really don't know how reliable survey data is as well. This is just something that media planners use…
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