Believe it or not there are countries out there where TV audience data is not available. Primarily these are small or developing countries where audience measurement companies like AGB Nielsen do not operate, probably because it is not cost effective to use traditional audience measurement methods. Examples of such countries abound in Africa and I know of at least one region in Spain where they have this problem.

Since mobile phones are ubiquitous even in the developing world these days, it occurs to me that a Twitter-like (kind of) service could be used to gather audience data in such places. The idea would be for a service to exist that gathers a large panel of people and regularly sends them ”What are you watching?” messages by SMS messaging. Hopefully a large enough proportion of the panel replies each time and the data collected is made available to TV advertisers for a fee.

Of course there are some challenges here. For one, if the data returned by panel members is in free text form, a lot of data cleansing may be required before the data can be analysed and used. Perhaps a format can be agreed with the panel before hand and a reminder of the format sent with each request for data. This would of course limit the number of TV channels measured.

Another challenge would be how to motivate panel members to respond. There would have to be some sort of incentive relating to how regularly they respond to update requests from the service. I guess this is true for traditional audience measurement as well.

This service is probably an easier sell in countries where no audience data does not exist at all but I wonder if it could be explored as an alternative approach even in countries where traditional audience measurement does exist. The advantages over traditional methods are that it would be cheaper and would allow larger audience-panel sizes.

What do you think? Would the challenges be too great to overcome?