Barb Briefing

Barb AND CFLIGHT COMBINE FOR TOTAL TV PLANNING

Sky uses Barb’s Advanced Campaign Hub alongside Sky Media’s CFlight to plan and evaluate campaigns across our VOD and linear channels. And Sky is pleased to be working with Channel 4 and ITV to ensure CFlight is the industry’s first unified metric for live, on-demand and time-shifted commercial impressions across all mainstream viewing platforms in the UK.

The campaign planning side allows integrated planning across broadcast airtime and BVOD. Barb’s panel data on broadcast viewing combines with RSMB’s model of Barb panellists’ BVOD viewing of each broadcaster’s VOD player. And CFlight works alongside that as a post-campaign evaluation tool. While they have different purposes, they are now integrated to provide a holistic campaign performance report. It means we can now look at the full picture.

The Barb BVOD Planner is of great value prior to a campaign going out, enabling us to understand potential cross-platform reach from the combination of broadcast airtime and VOD. Then post-campaign we get CFlight reporting which is based on an innovative methodology developed by RSMB based on the Barb gold standard. It means we’re working to high metrics, high standards.

Of course, Barb and CFlight are two different sources, so it’s important for agencies and their advertiser clients to have confidence about the comparability of the data and the ability of the two sources to be integrated well.

We can be confident. For the vast majority of campaigns, when we investigate platform reach using Barb’s BVOD Planner or CFlight’s campaign reporting, we see similar levels of reach reported by both. This validates both systems and gives us confidence when we plan with the Barb BVOD tool that the deduplication procedures are working in a meaningful way for everyone. This is important for aligning campaign performance as planned using Barb, with campaign performance as validated and reported by CFlight. Crucially, it means there’s a good chance we’re not overpromising cross-platform coverage when we’re planning, and we can see we haven’t underdelivered on cross-platform coverage when campaigns are validated in CFlight.

This is critical because we don’t want there to be a lack of confidence in the tools and the combination of them. We can see that it is actually very robust.

When we’re working on a proposal, the Barb BVOD Planner allows us to treat TV and VOD as part of the same video ecosystem, and not give them two different reach numbers. Until Barb offered the BVOD Planner, we simply couldn’t do this. We were very reliant for planning purposes on the IPA’s Touchpoints Channel Planner.

The real power of Touchpoints as a source for communications planners is that it’s completely cross-media, enabling the AV to be put into a wider context of people’s consumption of any kind of media. But when we’re focused on video and when our clients and agencies are talking about video, we are all best-placed if we can use a data-source built on the industry gold standard for broadcast video and continuously updated. That combination of pre-and-post analysis puts the broadcasters absolutely where we should be in leading the broader market for AV advertising.

At Sky, this works for us in a number of ways. One is when we’re able to identify how to add the VOD element to a campaign laydown and take it beyond natural delivery. In broadcast linear airtime, campaigns can be highly skewed towards certain channels, programming or dayparts as a certain type of viewer is targeted. The BVOD Planner demonstrates the value of incremental reach that VOD can add. We’ve used this for clients across many different categories, and it’s always a positive conversation. It allows us to plan campaigns by device and campaign reach achievable across the Sky Media portfolio.

We often get asked about our ability to target every audience, and the Barb BVOD planner has helped us to demonstrate the value of our platforms in terms of the incremental reach they offer – for younger audiences for example. And it has been very useful too in demonstrating the potential of VOD for audiences you might not automatically think of for those sorts of campaigns.

And using CFlight to provide that postcampaign, full-circle analysis to advertisers, it reinforces perceptions of our ability as broadcasters to deliver campaigns that are deduplicated, focused on one reach outcome. We’ve long had to contend with different metrics and different viewing principles but that is now no longer an issue.

We’re in the early days of talking to advertisers and agencies about all this, so things will soon get moving quickly. Early in Q4 of this year, we’ll have the full launch of CFlight, so that media agencies and advertisers can look at the performance (for the All Adult audience) of their AV campaigns across linear and BVOD. The rollout is planned in phases across 2022 and 2023, so next year will see deduplicated reach figures available for additional audiences as well as functions like regionality.

In summary, the combination of CFlight and the Barb BVOD Planner is such a benefit to the AV ecosystem. Advertisers and agencies can build effective campaigns with much more confidence. It helps broadcasters highlight the value of premium content programming in advertising environments where brand safety is a given and where audience measurement is done with objectivity and transparency. The combination of the Barb BVOD planner with Sky’s CFlight enables advertisers to justify their spend with us, knowing how to balance their investments between linear and broadcast. And that’s a real positive.

Ruth Cartwright, Director of Investment, Sky Media