From late September, advertisers and media agencies in the UK will be able to use Barb’s Advanced Campaign Hub to plan campaigns that include Netflix’s ad tier and discovery+ in their mix. Amazon’s Prime Video, including Freevee, was added in June, meaning buyers can now gain a holistic view of campaigns that include these popular streaming services alongside the leading BVODs and broadcast linear TV.
Advanced Campaign Hub is a pre-campaign planning and analysis tool and was originally designed (with a June 2020 launch) for mixing BVOD with linear, showing the contribution that BVOD can offer (like incremental reach) on top of linear TV. On-demand services from ITV, Sky, Channel 4, Channel 5 and UKTV are already included.
Now buyers can assess the contributions that Netflix, discovery+ and Prime Video can make on top of linear with BVOD, or against linear. The contribution of individual streaming services can be assessed against any campaign mix. Barb is also in advanced discussions with Disney about the addition of Disney+, which now has an ad-tier, to Advanced Campaign Hub.
Advanced Campaign Hub provides the means to forecast the unduplicated reach and frequency for campaigns on Barb-reported commercial services on TV sets, PCs, tablets and smartphones. This includes reach against specified target audiences, as well as by service or device. It can be used to plan standalone campaigns, as well as campaigns that combine a mix of platforms and services.
Barb is the standard for TV measurement in the UK, underpinning the currency. Advanced Campaign Hub combines Barb panel data with census-level impressions supplied directly by the participating streaming services.
The addition of Netflix coincides with a panel update that differentiates homes taking the ad-tier version of the service from those on the ad-free subscription. Barb is talking to Disney about providing the same insight for Disney+ with ads, in anticipation of its inclusion in Advanced Campaign Hub. Ad tier differentiation is not necessary for discovery+, whose subscription plans all include ads.
Barb calls this “yet another breakthrough moment in the evolution of our audience-centric data”. Netflix has been “incredibly engaged in the process”, it adds.
Luca Vannini, Head of Campaign Audiences at Barb, adds: “This is a big step forward in delivering what buyers have asked for. It is really significant that these companies [global SVODs with ad tiers] engaged with Barb and want to be measured in the same way as everyone else.”
He points out that Barb continues to deliver on its roadmap to go beyond reporting broadcaster services only. These latest developments should be viewed in the context of existing service-level reporting for Prime Video, Netflix and Disney that began in November 2021, and service-level measurement of viewing on YouTube and TikTok (classified by Barb as video sharing platforms) since the same year (covering in-home viewing on any device via Wi-Fi).
There is plenty of innovation still to come, not least in CFlight, which provides the post-campaign reporting on multiscreen campaigns, today covering broadcast linear and BVOD. Barb is now responsible for the governance of this leading measurement solution.
For broadcast linear viewing, CFlight relies on Barb panel measurement. For VOD viewing, CFlight takes device-level impressions from VOD service first-party data and converts these to audience impact data using a method that harnesses people-based observations sourced from the Barb panel.
The Advanced Campaign Hub and CFlight are two complementary systems enabling what Barb calls “a virtuous cycle of campaign optimization across linear and VOD services”. Vannini says a natural next step will be to expand CFlight post-campaign reporting to include SVOD services with ad tiers, and discussions about this are underway.
Vannini has provided some additional insights on the multi-step innovation roadmap for CFlight. This includes:
Recently achieved:
- The ability to run CFlight analyses against the most widely used audience targets. This was introduced in March; before then you could only look at ‘all adults’.
Still to come:
- The addition of more broadcaster VOD services, such as STV Player and TNT Sports.
- As stated above, inclusion of SVOD ad-tier services (the likes of Prime Video, Netflix and Disney+). Discussions are underway.
- The ability to show the contributions to a campaign from each sales house, looking beyond a single figure for VOD contribution. “There is agreement in principle, but the specifics need to be worked out,” Vannini says.
- The ability to analyse campaigns that only run on VOD, rather than always on both VOD and linear. Vannini says this is a minority use-case, but demand could grow in future.
Advanced Campaign Hub and CFlight are widely used by UK broadcasters and media agencies to support full-cycle campaign evaluation across linear and on-demand. This month Barb has also announced the start of a tender process for a new development: Total Campaign Reporting Suite. This will include access to both Advanced Campaign Hub and CFlight.
With these developments, Barb is addressing the outstanding media challenge of the day – enabling media buyers to plan and measure holistically in a fragmented media universe and understand the contribution of different services, and especially new services as they are added, and do this easily. Having major SVOD ad tiers plus BVOD plus linear in the same place is a big deal.
Photo shows Luca Vannini, Head of Campaign Audiences at Barb.
