Barb awards CFlight Landscape Study to BVA BDRC Barb

Barb, the industry’s standard for understanding what people watch, today announced it has awarded the CFlight Landscape Study to insights consultancy BVA BDRC. This study will enable Barb to accurately estimate the size and profile of audiences to TV platforms in the UK and understand the household dynamics of video-on-demand (VOD) consumption.

Barb assumed governance responsibility in January for CFlight, the world’s only joint-industry total campaign reporting service. It relies on trusted data sources, audited to high quality standards, to provide de-duplicated reach and frequency of ad campaigns across all linear and VOD platforms.

The study tasks BVA BDRC with conducting 8,000 nationally representative interviews with adults aged 16+ in UK households. The results will be inputted into the CFlight model to inform the estimation of reach and frequency of linear and VOD. The study will be repeated annually to reflect the dynamic nature of what people watch in the UK.

Jim Jarrett, Head of Research Operations at Barb, said:

“As part of Barb’s development of CFlight we look forward to refreshing the Landscape Study with BVA BDRC. As more VOD services integrate advertising into their business models, it’s important that the Landscape Study is updated to reflect how audiences are evolving in response. This is the cornerstone of CFlight and will enhance our audience measurement service by giving advertisers, agencies and broadcasters deeper insights into how their campaigns are performing.”

Tim Barber, Director at BVA BDRC, said:

“We are thrilled to be appointed by Barb to manage the CFlight Landscape Study. Our award-winning expertise and insights will help refresh the services measured by CFlight to deliver the next iteration of TV measurement.”

CFlight is complementary to Barb’s Advanced Campaign Hub, which provides pre-campaign planning analysis across linear channels and BVOD services, including budget optimisation. Together, these audience-reporting tools enable media buyers to conduct end-to-end analysis of total campaign performance across linear channels and BVOD services.

As part of Barb’s joint-industry reporting of audiences, it intends to expand the number of services included in CFlight and the Advanced Campaign Hub. Any VOD or streaming service that is a full Barb licensee will be able to participate on the same terms as existing participants. In recent years, Disney+ and Netflix have become Barb licensees.

About CFlight

CFlight is the UK’s first unified TV advertising metric that captures the vast majority of live, time-shifted and on-demand commercial impacts and impressions across all viewing platforms. CFlight enables TV and AV buyers to see the total de-duplicated reach and frequency of their campaigns across all forms of TV.

CFlight’s methodology relies on the combined strength of device data and panel data. First-party data relating to ad campaigns served on VOD services is compiled alongside linear campaign performance from the Barb panel. The first-party data, provided by Sky Media, ITV Media and 4 Sales, delivers robust, device-level impressions. These are converted to audience impact data through a method that uses people-based observations sourced from the Barb panel.

Originally created by NBCU in the US, CFlight was adapted for the UK marketplace by Sky. Prior to becoming part of Barb’s audience-reporting services, broadcaster CFlight has been a joint initiative between Sky Media, ITV Media and 4 Sales in the UK. Industry body Thinkbox has facilitated CFlight’s development with the involvement of Barb and Clearcast. TV-audience specialists RSMB and TechEdge have played integral roles in terms of data architecture and processing respectively. Media auditor ABC conducted a design effectiveness audit and continues to audit data inputs.