By Etan Vlessing
OTTAWA – Neil McEneaney, president and CEO of media measurement firm Numeris, was on the hot seat Thursday as he told the virtual CMPA Prime Time conference how the Canadian TV ratings firm collects and measures race-based audience data amid an industry reckoning.
McEneaney told an online panel that while Black Canadians and others from diverse communities were included in Numeris panels for a representative sample of domestic TV viewership, Numeris isn’t “segmenting one race or another” as it focuses on broad Canadian French and English language TV audiences.
He explained Numeris’ “measurement design” for data points is to report national and major market audiences by representing the Canadian population in specific demographics like sex, gender and age. But as McEneaney untangled the big data inputs and modeling behind his TV audience measurement, he defended his ratings firm for not getting granular in reporting the day-to-day TV viewership data of Canadian race-based and ethnic audiences.
McEneaney pointed out multi-language Canadians were also on Numeris panels, but “the reality is those audience numbers in themselves can’t be reported separately, because they are quite small.” He added a lack of measurement effort or resources at Numeris wasn’t the cause of Canadian race-based audiences not being properly counted.
Instead, McEneaney turned the focus away from Numeris to the wider Canadian industry, including publishers and broadcasters, and urged them to come together to aggregate existing big data on race-based audiences for greater measurement insights. “We all collect significant amounts of race-based data and we have to come at this differently, we have to understand what we have and complement each other and leverage the race-based data that’s been collected and could generate a data set of scale,” he insisted.
“We don’t have any information on how racialized Canadians watch television, when they watch it, what modes of consumption they use, and specifically what type of shows they like to watch.” – Floyd Kane, Freddie Films
However, Floyd Kane of Freddie Films, the creator of CBC’s legal drama Diggstown, insisted if big data on Canadian race-based TV audiences already exists, it isn’t being made public to the industry and elsewhere for the use by marketing brands and TV producers. “We don’t have any information on how racialized Canadians watch television, when they watch it, what modes of consumption they use, and specifically what type of shows they like to watch,” Kane told the panel.
“It’s like we’re crawling around on our hands and knees in the dark,” he added, for example, as the CBC attempts to target Black Canadian audiences and advertisers with its Diggstown drama, with poor or no data.
Kane also argued the industry could not effectively move forward on measuring raced-based audiences if it did not first account for the omission of such granular data in Canadian TV audience measurement. “If the audiences are valued, they’re measured,” Kane told the panel, while adding that not counting race-based audiences was “100%” connected to the lack of programming on linear Canadian TV channels aimed at underrepresented communities.
The need to fully track race-based TV audiences was also supported by Valerie Creighton, president and CEO of the Canada Media Fund. She told the panel TV audience data and measurement was key to setting the size of the CMF’s competitive broadcast envelopes, and not having specific Numeris data to offer a full portrait of Canadian audiences partially tied her agency’s hands.
“By using Numeris, we don’t capture all of their audiences, we don’t capture a huge portion of those they believe are watching television and aren’t captured by Numeris,” Creighton said, recalling discussions with APTN and other smaller broadcasters in recent years. Numeris, it’s worth noting, is owned and controlled by its Canadian broadcaster and ad agency membership.
She added recent industry initiatives towards greater diversity and inclusion in Canadian TV, both on screen and off, needed greater data input from Numeris to achieve those goals. “There’s no going back from this,” Creighton told the virtual panel as the CMF gets set this spring to hold industry consultations on including race and diversity in Canadian audience analytics ahead of a new ratings measurement regime expected in 2022.
To find the way forward, Sean Cohan, Nielsen Global Media’s chief growth officer and president, international, urged Canadian marketers, broadcasters and TV producers to forge ahead and get granular about race-based audiences. His U.S.-based ratings firm, besides drilling down to measure race-based audiences, offers additional consumption insights for the benefit of marketing brands and TV producers.
While conceding Canada and the U.S. are different TV markets, Cohen argued it was important for the entertainment industry everywhere to be “reflective and responsible” on screen and behind the screen as it chased audiences with TV programming.
The panelists agreed that, despite the small size of the Canadian TV market compared to south of the border, it’s imperative from both commercial and social equity perspectives to fully count racialized audiences. “It’s probably of paramount importance to the country to get this done, so that there are more than two or three series of this nature on television and it is driving interests and ads are being bought,” Creighton said.
Nielsen’s Cohan, a former TV content exec with A&E Networks and Wheelhouse Entertainment, echoed Kane in expressing frustration when targeting a Black audience with a series, and then seeing it mostly miss that bull’s eye. “I know your pain, because I was in pain when we put out this great show that’s uniquely relevant for certain parts of the audience, and you’d meet that audience and they had no idea the show existed,” he recounted.
“Clearly the lack of information out there is at play,” Cohan added.
“The simple legislative amendments we are proposing with respect to Bill C-10 are decades overdue.” – Aldo Di Felice, TLN Media
The push for greater measurement of race-based Canadian audience data is hoped to dovetail with the current legislative process around Bill C-10 as the federal government looks to modernize the Broadcasting Act.
Aldo Di Felice, president of the TLN Media Group, which operates a host of multi-language ethnic channels, told Cartt.ca that Numeris issues around narrow audience measurement are “in the weeds” of the Canadian industry and deserve to be focused and acted on within Bill C-10 and in new regulations adopted by the CRTC after its passage.
Di Felice said none of the 97 recommendations of the Broadcast and Telecom Legislative Review panel report upon which Bill C-10 is based, addresses ethnic minorities, multilingualism or multiculturalism (the BTLR report does concentrate heavily on Indigenous Canadian media) and that TLN and other independent broadcasters are lobbying for change.
“The simple legislative amendments we are proposing with respect to Bill C-10 are decades overdue and will in fact put all affected minority ethnic, linguistic and racialized communities in a position to demand regulators and bureaucrats implementing the ‘modernized’ Broadcasting Act do so without continuing to minimize and marginalize participation by such ethno-linguistic and racial minorities,” Di Felice argued.
