Barb’s Advanced Campaign Hub planning tool has been overestimating broadcaster VOD (BVOD) reach by an average of 40%.
The issue was revealed by Omnicom Media Group UK chief planning officer Vicky Fox on a panel at The Future of TV Advertising Global on Wednesday.
According to Fox, in November Barb communicated to agencies the significant reporting discrepancy between the Advanced Campaign Hub and CFlight, of which Barb took governance in January.
“Barb turned around and said: ‘Our measurement was wrong on BVOD,'” she told the audience. “Congratulations, the report that came out a few weeks ago — it could be 40% out on BVOD.”
Sky Media’s director of systems and development, Jeff Eales, who was chairing the panel, was shocked, saying: “So you told me something I genuinely don’t know.”
Fox added: “That undermines the trust in the measurement system.” Eales agreed: “It certainly does.”
The Advanced Campaign Hub is Barb’s pre-campaign planning tool. Launched in 2020, it combines linear Barb panel data with first-party data, with census-level impressions supplied directly by participating VOD services.
CFlight, meanwhile, offers a unified, deduplicated post-campaign TV advertising metric for linear and VOD services.
It is understood that a discrepancy has not been observed in linear figures.
Barb: Adapting methodology
Luca Vannini, head of campaign audiences at Barb, told The Media Leader: “Since assuming governance responsibility for CFlight in January 2024, Barb has prioritised the comparison of campaign forecasts produced by its Advanced Campaign Hub planning tool with the performance of actual campaigns reported by CFlight.
“The results of this assessment show that VOD reach estimates in the Advanced Campaign Hub tended to be higher than in CFlight.”
He added that, in collaboration with Barb’s industry stakeholders (including both advertising buyers and sellers), the TV measurement body is currently working to adapt Advanced Campaign Hub methodology to “ensure that the results are more aligned with CFlight”.
The Media Leader has learned that such changes could be made as early as January.
It is understood that the discrepancy goes back years and it was only after Barb took over CFlight that it was uncovered.
Adapting the Advanced Campaign Hub methodology “will result in lower VOD reach for campaigns at the planning stage”, Vannini explained.
He added: “This change shows how learnings from post-campaign evaluation can inform campaign planning to deliver a virtuous cycle of campaign optimisation across linear TV and VOD services.”
During the panel, Fox added that she is “usually frustrated” that she cannot measure BVOD like linear TV more generally and she wishes VOD ad server data could be better merged with data from linear to give a holistic view of broadcaster viewership.
Fox conceded that this is a challenge for the TV measurement body, adding that CFlight is “a start”.
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