Barb Briefing Note: Response to press coverage 16 December 2024 On December 12th 2024, The Media Leader posted a story which draws attention to an issue in how Barb has been reporting audiences for BVOD services. Barb is committed to supporting advertisers and media agencies in their aim for a virtuous cycle of campaign optimisation across linear channels and VOD services. Our actions to adjust one part of our campaign-reporting methodology mean that buyers and sellers can have more confidence that learnings from post-campaign evaluation are coherent with planning for subsequent campaigns. The issue highlighted in The Media Leader relates to how we estimate campaign performance in our pre-campaign planning tool, which is called Advanced Campaign Hub. It is nothing to do with our daily audience reporting for BVOD services, which relies on a combination of panel data and BVOD census data. All pre-campaign planning tools use models to estimate the reach of a campaign. There will always be a difference between these estimates of campaign reach and what is actually delivered. Barb’s delivery of campaign-reporting tools for linear & VOD services is subject to joint-industry scrutiny. As with all parts of our audience reporting, this scrutiny is designed to ensure we learn from real evidence to deliver insight that’s as accurate as possible. Since assuming responsibility for CFlight at the beginning of the year, Barb has prioritised a joint-industry assessment of how actual campaign delivery, as reported by CFlight, compares with pre-campaign estimates generated by Advanced Campaign Hub. This process was overseen by Barb’s Total Campaign Reporting Workstream, which reports to our Management Board. Our assessment compared the reach of 437 VOD campaigns run on CFlight with their equivalents in the pre-campaign planning tool. The comparison shows that pre-campaign reach estimates for VOD were typically higher by around 40% at the total-campaign level. The differences between reach estimates and actual campaign delivery were considerably lower when looking at individual VOD services. The assessment concluded with a recommendation to harmonise an aspect of the methodologies1. The effect of this harmonisation will be lower estimates of campaign reach on VOD services within our pre-campaign reporting tool. Here are two examples of what this means for de-duplicated campaign reach across linear channels and VOD services. A medium-weight campaign targeting all adults2 will now be estimated to reach 54% of the target audience, rather than 56%. A medium-weight campaign targeting 16-34 year olds3 will now be estimated to reach 48% of the target audience, rather than 55%. There is no change to the CFlight methodology. Notes CFlight uses the negative-binomial distribution as part of its method, while Advanced Campaign Hub has been using Poisson distribution. We will harmonise to the negative-binomial distribution, which is also an established part of Barb’s methodology for reporting linear-campaign performance. Medium-weight campaign targeting adults aged 16+ is comprised of 200 TVRs in a mix of linear channels and 20 TVRs in a mix of VOD service. Medium-weight campaign targeting 16-34 year olds is comprised of 150 TVRs in a mix of linear channels and 100 TVRs in a mix of VOD services.