Get me the referee’s phone number

As Barb’s CEO approaches the end of his tenure, the issues raised by FIFA’s inability to consistently apply its own rules have got Justin Sampson thinking about who measurement should answer to.

In the FIFA World Cup’s knockout round of 16, Folarin Balogun played for the United States against Belgium.

He should have been in the stands. His red card in the previous game carried an automatic one-match ban. Automatic is FIFA’s word. Unappealable has always been FIFA’s position.

Then Donald Trump rang Gianni Infantino, and Balogun was strapping his boots on. Belgium was astonished. UEFA spoke of a red line crossed. The ban turned out to be neither automatic nor unappealable.

Miguel Maduro put it best, telling the FT that this was one more sign that FIFA is “a system of rules without the rule of law.”

It’s worth listening to Maduro. As a former advocate general at the European Court of Justice, he was hired by FIFA in 2016 to chair its governance committee.

Not long into his tenure, he applied a rule that prevents government ministers from holding football governance roles. Coming shortly before the 2018 World Cup in Russia, this was inconvenient to the host country, whose deputy prime minister wanted to sit on the FIFA council. Maduro lasted less than a year at FIFA.

The lesson? Rules are not enough. What matters is who applies them — and whether they answer to the people they judge.

This question is on my mind as I come to the end of my tenure at Barb.

Media measurement has never lacked rules. There are plenty of standards, definitions, metrics, mostly underpinned by detailed documentation.

But ask Maduro’s question: who do the rule-appliers answer to? A referee who reports to the player will make good calls right up until a call becomes inconvenient. Then someone picks up the phone.

Joint-industry measurement exists to make that phone call pointless. Buyers and sellers jointly appoint the referee. They fund it together. They hold it to published standards together. No single party — however large — can lean on the result. That is not a technical feature. It is the whole point.

And it matters far and wide in our industry. Shared, verified audience data is part of the evidence infrastructure of a healthy media market.

Media buyers and sellers use it to trade fairly. Advertisers rely on it to understand effectiveness. Investors and commissioners use it to choose which content to back. UK producers use it to prove the value of their programmes abroad. Regulators use it to assess markets. And policymakers use it to weigh media plurality.

One dataset, many public purposes.

Take away the shared referee and all of this weakens. Transparency shrinks. Comparability fades. Compliance gets harder to evidence. Competition and policy questions become matters of assertion rather than fact. This is a systemic market issue, not a technology one.

I have argued before that trusted measurement rests on the credibility of the institution behind it. Joint governance makes impartiality structural. Transparency tells you what the referee saw, and joint governance means nobody can ring the referee.

None of this requires a regulator. That is the quiet achievement of the UK model. For many decades, competing businesses have collaborated on shared evidence, held to common principles of transparency, comparability and auditability — without a line of statute.

The joint-industry model that underpins Barb is mature, multilateral and, to those of us who have lived inside it, quietly magical. This is a legacy to keep building on. It is infrastructure to be extended, to cover every screen and every service that wants to be judged independently and transparently.

One reason Barb is admired worldwide is that we have embraced new market entrants.

Perhaps the most pleasant surprise during my time at Barb came shortly after Netflix signed up to our service in 2022. The decision we put to the Board was to formally rename the company to remove any reference to broadcasters. It took only moments to reach agreement that this was the right signal to send to the industry. Barb has gone beyond broadcasters.

And the door remains open. Any service, of any size, is welcome to be measured on joint-industry terms, under rules applied equally to all. Some of the biggest media businesses on earth already are. Their numbers are the more bankable for it.

The offer asks one thing only — accept the ruling even when it goes against you.

The fact that FIFA couldn’t manage this shows how fast governance fails when acceptance is optional. Nobody repealed a rule. Nobody needed to. The meaning of the untouched rulebook drained away in a single phone call, live on the world’s biggest stage.

Governance may be the least glamorous thing our industry builds, yet it is also the most consequential. It’s invisible when it’s working well. And it’s newsworthy when it falls short of industry expectations.

So as we think about the future of audience measurement, do we keep choosing a shared currency of truth, applied equally to all? Or do we accept a system of rules without the rule of law, and hand out the referee’s phone number?

Justin Sampson is the CEO of Barb