The Treachery of TRP The TRP debate is timely.The Times of India in its report says “The entire TRP system that underpins over Rs 25,000 crore worth of TV advertising is riddled with serious vulnerabilities and challenges. A tiny and skewed sample of 44000 homes for a viewership of 84 crore, outdated survey data, regulatory changes –and, as the ongoing scandal has highlighted, scope for manipulation through bribery “, the TRP as a metric for measuring viewership is flawed has become highly questionable. The stakeholders in the system are the advertises, the ad agencies, the media i.e. TV channels and last but not the least, the customers of products and services advertised. In the case of customers, however, data is captured on the duration for which their TV boxes were kept switched on for particular TV channel(s), while no data is gathered on the time spent actually on viewing the programme(s). I am amused at the naivety of the ad industry into believing that their ad spends in English language news TV channels fully serve the purpose of advertising i.e. to help recall the product advertised in the minds of the customer while making a purchase decision. Most viewers feel annoyed by their interrupting occurrence repeatedly throughout the transmission which perhaps tend rather to anger than evoke interest The viewer is bored and compelled to change to another and lo it is an ad break there too !.. So, the audio is put on mute mode till the news anchor's face, which looks equally bored, appears. Another reason for muting the sound byte in ad is its relatively higher decibel level. For these reasons it will not be incorrect to say that TV advertisements in India are counter- productive.