Barb, the UK’s TV audience measurement body, has announced an upgrade to CFlight that will offer extended reporting of traded audiences.
CFlight has now incorporated 14 of the most-used traded audiences into its reporting: ABC1 adults; ABC1 housepersons; ABC1 men; ABC1 women; Adults 16+; Adults 16-34; Adults 25-44; Adults 45+; Housepersons; Housepersons with children; Men 16+; Men 16-34; Women 16+; and women 16-34.
In doing so, media buyers now have access to comprehensive ad campaign performance across these audiences.
Luca Vannini, head of campaign audiences at Barb, first revealed the news at Connected TV World Summit on Tuesday.
“This business-critical development of CFlight is transformational for advertisers and media buyers,” said Vannini.
“For the first time, they have free access to total campaign performance reporting against major trading audiences. Full investment accountability on campaigns that run across what people watch in the UK, on both linear and VOD services, is now available from this ground-breaking industry collaboration.”
CFlight takes ‘big step forward’ as broadcasters test trading audiences
Originally launched in 2022, CFlight is a joint initiative that, since January, has been under the control of Barb, with the goal of delivering “total campaign” reporting on behalf of Sky, ITV and Channel 4.
It is the first unified, deduplicated TV advertising metric for linear and VOD services, and is complementary to Barb’s Advanced Campaign Hub audience-reporting tool.
The broadcasters had been testing the traded audiences within CFlight since November 2023, with late-stage testing occurring with members of the IPA’s TV Research Action Group since February.
The launch on Wednesday means access has now been extended to all media agencies in a beta phase, which is expected to last “a couple of months”, according to Barb.
As part of Barb’s joint-industry reporting of audiences, it intends to further expand the number of services included in CFlight and Advanced Campaign Hub in the near future. Any VOD or streaming service that is a full Barb licensee will be able to participate on the same terms as existing participants.
Disney+, Netflix and most recently Amazon Prime Video have all become Barb licensees.
