What People Watch

Agencies and advertisers want to understand the best place to reach their specific target audiences. This is always true, but even more so in the run up to Christmas where UK household expenditure rises by 29% (around £20 billion collectively) according to The Bank of England.

The Barb integration within IPA Touchpoints lets us do just this. It offers thousands of ways to create target audiences that go beyond core demographics. Gaming is a space within the wider marketing industry that is attracting increasing attention and Barb data show that in any given week about 3% of TV-set time has a games console as its source.

IPA Touchpoints offers an extensive range of questions to define a gaming audience. Immediately we are able to size the total gamers market – 24.6m have played any game on any device in the last year. Clearly, we’d like to narrow that down somewhat.

If we focus on those who game at least daily on a console, handheld device, PC/laptop or cloud-based service we narrow to 3.9m individuals. The regularity and more specialised devices/services used mean we can define this group as more serious gamers than those who game less often and on non-gaming specific devices like a smartphone.

Comparing this audience to those aged 16+ (to match the overall IPA Touchpoints sample) we see that they consumed 23% less broadcaster content in November this year, slightly more pure-play VOD content and spent 30% more time with video sharing services. We also see that their time with unidentified content / services is higher.

Chart 1: Serious Gamers still spend more than half of their time with Broadcaster and pure-play VOD services

Source: Barb November 2024

Breaking that unidentified viewing by device in use we can see that twice as much of our serious Gamers time here is coming from a games console compared to all those aged 16+. This makes sense and reassures us that the audience that identify as regular gamers are indeed using a games console more than the average person. They are also more likely to view pure-play VOD and video sharing services via a games console, albeit this is at a low level.

If we delve into the kinds of content consumed, we see our serious-gamers using broadcaster and pure-play VOD services for kids content, films and sport more than the average individual aged 16+, but less for hobbies / leisure, documentaries and news / weather.

Chart 2: The youthful nature of the serious-gamer audience shows in their most watched genres

Source: Barb November 2024. CCIDS genres accounting for at least 1% of viewing time.

Narrowing further still we can pick out programmes that our serious gamers enjoy. We see kids content to the fore. We also see an interesting spread of channels and services. Half of the top 10 here are from pure-play VOD services, while the vast catalogue of 33 Top Gear series and associated specials are clearly popular via BBC iPlayer. The audience to Friends on Netflix is similar in size to that on Comedy Central in the table, but the index of 97 makes the serious gamers marginally less likely to watch Friends on Netflix than all those 16+, while they are much more likely to watch on Comedy Central.

Table 1: Ay Carumba – serious gamers have The Simpsons on repeat

Source: Barb November 2024. Viewing to any episode for the programmes included. Filtered for those with an index >150 against the 16+ population.

Understanding of Gamers viewing habits will be very useful for certain agencies and advertisers and is just one example of how we can define an audience using IPA Touchpoints. We could also use attitude statements or even people’s mood.

Barb Extended Audiences – an early Christmas present

Barb Extended Audiences from Kantar Media TGI are now available to all Barb media and agency subscribers via Techedge. This is an abridged version of the full TGI dataset. These questions, and those available via IPA Touchpoints, have significant crossover with the Additional Panel Classification questions. As such we have decided to discontinue updates of the Lifestyle Insights survey that feed these APCs.

Given that Christmas is nearly upon us it seems apt to analyse a Christmas based target using the new Barb Extended Audiences capability. In the table below we can see the programmes that index most highly for those who say they are “panic” Christmas shoppers.

Table 2: Panic buyers watch 6% more TV than average

Source: Barb week 49 2024 (Dec 2^nd-8^th). Viewing to any episode for the programmes included. Filtered for those with an audience >150k.

With our panic buyers watching more TV than average during the first week of December it maybe that procrastination is keeping them from completing the festive purchases in good time. But whatever the reason for “panic” buying the data allow us to identify what these people watched.

Doug Whelpdale is Head of Insight at Barb. For more information visit: barb.co.uk

Doug also shared a few highlights in this video below.

Notes:

IPA TouchPoints is available to all Barb subscribers who also subscribe to IPA TouchPoints. There is no fee from Barb to access these data.

Barb Extended Audiences are available to all Barb media and agency subscribers. There is no fee payable to Barb, although data processing bureaux may charge a fee to access these data. If you are a client of Techedge and would like to access Barb Extended Audiences, please contact Kantar Media at BEA@kantarmedia.com

Both data sets are for adults aged 16+ and do not cover Northern Ireland.