Barb Briefing

WHAT’S NEXT FOR Barb’S 360° AUDIENCE VIEW

There’s a huge amount of trust in the Barb data as the gold standard measurement currency for TV viewing. The incredibly rich dataset enables us to understand not just the volumes and the shares, but those nuances of audience flow across channels and how favourite shows deliver incredible loyalty from the audience. This insight powers our planning output.

We’ve seen the TV landscape change so incredibly quickly over the last 10 years that our planning job has required us to combine many different datasets together to build a true picture of someone’s media day. The types of viewing behaviour that we’ll soon be able to explore with Barb’s router-meter solution will essentially become the viewing norms of the future. Our viewing patterns are influenced by how we switch platforms when we view content. We might catch up on a tablet, watch a laptop in bed or use the streaming capabilities of connected TVs which have become the default technology.

So many people now have all those various devices, which is why we absolutely need to understand how audiences use apps and devices and navigate EPGs to view live television or catch-up. Understanding how content is viewed in the new world is crucially important. And that’s what we’re going to get out of this new data from Barb.

There’s going to be terrific advantage in having insight from Barb’s single-source panel and with the assurance of the gold-standard kitemark of a joint industry currency. Whenever we don’t have a single data source, we’re looking at matching different sources together using a probabilistic approach in which you’re finding audiences that are more likely to exhibit certain behaviours than others because of what you know about them. However, in this approach it’s not actually the same person you’re looking at, but two individuals linked together with particular clues. These clues might be their age, another demographic characteristic, or a behavioural trait that we know about them, for example being more likely to consume BVOD content.

A probabilistic approach is great — joining datasets to understand more about audiences — but the power of a single source panel cannot be underestimated. This is because relationships between different parts of the data are deterministic: we know the people that have seen this programme using a catch-up service on this device, for example, are the same people that have seen this other programme live on a different device. Those two behaviours are completely united.

Another thing we’re going to come up against is that self-scheduling is going to become so prevalent as we move into hybrid working patterns. Some people will work more from home, in fact some people will work exclusively from home, and we’ll see more adjusted travel patterns.

Classic scheduling behaviours have been based on traditional working patterns and commuting times, which have set the moments and rhythms of people’s days and therefore the ebb and flow of the TV schedules. With new patterns of working,
that’s going to change, and we expect to see that coming through in the Barb data.

Adding further to this phenomenon of self-scheduling is that tech has changed. We’ve seen the EPG evolve so that the linear schedule is no longer the most dominant part of the homepage. As broadcasters monetise those different areas of the schedule, we’ll see content becoming increasingly self-scheduled, and that’s something that we need to understand more about.

As planners, there’s nothing more important than gaining insight about how audiences consume media: how it fits into their lives, the feelings it evokes in those moments; how it informs, enriches and entertains. And therefore, how our advertising can build our clients’ brands not just by building the right amounts of coverage and frequency but also by amplifying people’s experience of the advertising by knowing about their relationship with the context that it’s in.

The core of my job as a media planner is to wrap advertising messages around that content in the most effective way. And even if it’s non-commercial content, I still want to know about it, because it should impact how we make decisions about our advertising on the commercial channels. As Barb evolves to provide more granularity about SVOD viewing, this dataset is going to be so important because I still want to know about the viewing to shows like Bridgerton on Netflix. When that show aired over Christmas, you could see in the chatter on Twitter and other social platforms how much people were talking about it. So, using that example, I really want to dig into a show’s audience so that I can ready myself – and my brands and the advertisers I work for – for season two. That knowledge will shape our expectations of the performance of the wider schedule and the advertising planning decisions we make.

And similarly, I want to know about the commercialised part of Amazon Prime – even though it’s a small part of their overall content portfolio. Live sport is crucial for building reach, and therefore I need to understand how I create joined-up plans across BT, Sky and Amazon Prime. Barb’s new dataset will enable that.

Understanding how reach and frequency build is the essence of media planning. Balancing them out is key to why television is so incredibly powerful for brands at driving ROI. The new dataset from Barb is going to help agencies to plan both dimensions more effectively. Barb already helps us to understand how reach builds – per pound spent – through the programmes and channels people watch. This insight informs the emotional connection that advertising can make with the audience.

Very soon we will know more about how viewing overlaps across different platforms, which is a strong driver of
frequency. Frequency is great for helping your advertising cut through, driving comprehension and emotional connection.
But if you build too much frequency and not enough reach, you’re weakening the power of your television advertising. For example, if we keep spending against campaigns that aren’t driving reach but are driving excess frequency, it’s not just wasteful; it can start to have a negative impact by making the audience feel bombarded by that advertising.

I am really looking forward to the new data that’s coming from Barb later in 2021. Already, new data on programming are
providing important insights to help us build our campaigns. For planners, that’s a stepping-stone to the potential of that holy grail of managing the total inventory of our clients’ advertising across all the different platforms; and really getting a holistic view of television delivery for the future TV marketplace. Barb’s new developments will help us build more successful advertising campaigns.

Vicky Fox, Chief Planning Officer, OMD UK