New Appointment 27 September 2016 Barb welcomes Rhiannon Griffiths to the executive team as Head of Strategic Developments. Rhiannon Griffiths has joined Barb from Guardian News and Media where she was Head of Research. Her appointment reflects Barb’s need to drive innovation in television audience measurement while maintaining its gold standard currency. As Head of Strategic Developments, Rhiannon is responsible for projects that will result in Barb delivering new services. These include evaluating how we work with return path data, coordinating contract tenders and overseeing implementation of the next phase of Project Dovetail. During her 25 years as a primary research specialist at Guardian News and Media, Rhiannon developed and managed a variety of teams as well as providing insight and support to strategic planning and commercial sales. Her deep understanding of print and digital audience measurement made her an active member of trade research and technical committees, including being Co-Chair of the AOP Research Committee. Rhiannon said: “In recent years I have become increasingly involved in joint industry currencies and audience measurement. It’s clearly an exciting time for Barb as it keeps pace with developments in the television marketplace. I look forward to bringing my experience in managing quantitative research and data integration projects to the Barb team.” Justin Sampson, Chief Executive, Barb said: “Dealing with fragmentation is not a new issue for Barb and our strategy for future-proofing our services is both necessary and ambitious. Delivering this while keeping an eye on the day-to-day is the catalyst for adding Rhiannon to our team. She will be a great asset.” To find out more about Barb’s plans for the future, please take a look at our video on Project Dovetail. For further information or enquiries regarding this press release, please contact Charlotte Martin. Editor’s notes Barb (Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board) provides official viewing figures for UK television audiences. Its principal funders are BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5, IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising), ITV and Sky. Advertisers are represented at board level through ISBA. On behalf of these organisations and many other subscribers, Barb commissions specialist research companies Ipsos MORI, Kantar Media and RSMB to collect data that represent the television viewing behaviour of the UK’s 26 million TV households. Barb has three principal contracts that enable delivery of the TV measurement data. These, alongside the current research providers, are listed below: ‣ Survey design and methodology (RSMB) ‣ Establishment survey and panel recruitment (Ipsos-MORI) ‣ Panel management, meter installation, data collection, data production (Kantar Media) Barb viewing data give broadcasters, advertisers and other interested parties a minute-by-minute breakdown of viewing at regional and national levels. This information is vital in assessing how programmes, channels or advertising campaigns have performed and provides the basis for airtime advertising trading. Project Dovetail will deliver robust, cross-platform audience measurement by harnessing the strengths of two complementary data sources. ‣ Barb’s panel of 5,100 homes provides representative viewing information that includes programme and campaign reach, demographic viewing profiles and measurement of viewers per screen. ‣ Broadcasters are embedding software code in TV player apps that generates analytic tags each time a device requests content. This will create census-level data that record the total number of times a piece of content is watched and how long each viewing session is. Stage 1 of Project Dovetail is the TV Player Report. This beta report is Barb’s first publication of data for viewing that takes place on laptop/desktop PCs, tablets and smartphones. It focuses on activity at a device level, rather than a person level. You can read the latest version of the TV Player Report here. The second stage of Project Dovetail involves blending the data that come from the analytics tags with the viewing information we get from the Barb panel. By doing this we will deliver robust, cross-platform measurement so that our customers know what’s been watched, by whom and on which device.