CFlight’s evolution: Navigating complex simplicity in campaign reporting
Opinion
After joining Barb and announcing a significant update at Connected TV World Summit mere weeks later, Barb’s head of campaign audiences charts CFlight’s evolution in 2024.
When it comes to starting a new job, most people would expect a gentle initiation. Perhaps a few inductions and training sessions designed to let the newbie settle in and get to know new colleagues and clients.
So when I joined Barb in February, I wasn’t necessarily expecting to be on stage at Connected TV World Summit just a couple of weeks later, talking about our plans for taking CFlight forward.
Not only had I literally just joined the company, but CFlight had been under Barb’s governance for just two months. Initially a joint initiative between Sky Media, ITV Media and 4Sales, CFlight developed into a joint-industry project overseen by buyers and sellers when it moved under Barb in January.
The new boy (new to Barb… and to TV) came into focus on total campaign reporting and was immediately thrown in front of hundreds of delegates. Not sure if I should call it imposter syndrome, but I definitely didn’t feel in my comfort zone.
However, it did make perfect sense to be there. CFlight was the new jewel in the crown and, on that very day, we launched a significant upgrade — the ability to run analysis across the most widely used target audiences. In fact, up to that point, post-campaign evaluation across linear and broadcaster VOD services had only been available for the adults 16+ audience.
In the end, it didn’t turn out to be the baptism of fire that I had anticipated — the old cliché of “you know it better than your audience” applied even to me that day.
Building a shared understanding
If that experience now feels like a distant memory, it’s because of the learning journey that I have been on since then.
Six months on from the launch of target audiences seems a good time to reflect on what we have learned from CFlight and where we have got to so far.
As a cross-media solution, CFlight is based on a very simple concept that is implemented thanks to a highly complex and sophisticated methodology: turning ad impressions served to on-demand services’ user accounts into people’s impacts, which are comparable with linear impacts. From there, an estimate of the incremental reach delivered by VOD can be calculated, alongside the de-duplicated reach and frequency across linear channels and VOD players.
And all of this is possible as a result of bespoke architecture that receives campaign-specific impressions directly from the ad servers of participating services and leverages the infrastructure built by the TV industry over the years.
Easier said than done — literally.
Since the launch of target audiences on 12 March, our focus has been on building a shared understanding of CFlight among users. With the tool being available to all buyers of broadcaster VOD and linear airtime at no extra cost, this has meant talking to several media agencies and a few advertisers.
The addition of target audiences has enabled buyers to assess campaign performance across a number of key demographics such as 16-34s and ABC1 adults, just to name a few. This has unlocked new insight, allowing agencies to validate their assumptions around conversion rates, from ad impressions to people-based audiences, against trusted data produced at industry standard.
Launching this upgrade in beta proved to be the right move. It allowed us to unpick an issue with how CFlight was reporting performance of campaigns targeted at housepersons, and to find a solution to rectify it. Reporting for this demographic has been temporarily suspended and will be reinstated in early 2025 with an improved methodology.
Language matters
Access to analysis for target audiences has inevitably shed light on the dangers of false equivalence and the assumption that machine-level impressions and people impacts are the same thing. If standards matter, so does the language.
At Barb, we feel very strongly about language and what things are called. While VOD trading is based on impressions, CFlight has not been designed to directly “validate” that the impressions bought by agencies on behalf of advertisers have been delivered. This is left to conversations between buyers and sellers.
Guided by the joint-industry principles of fair and comparable audience measurement, the purpose of CFlight is to show how many people were reached by the campaign and how many times, providing accountability for the investment into VOD services. For this reason, CFlight only reports on people-based metrics.
And once a shared language has been established, it is then possible to make meaningful comparisons and derive useful insight for TV buyers and sellers. For example, having access now to unprecedented information on the effectiveness of VOD at delivering incremental reach, we have been able to carry out some statistical analysis across the newly added target audiences.
From this analysis, we have derived a rule of thumb on how much the proportion of impacts that goes into VOD tends to increase the overall coverage for cross-media campaigns of different sizes.
Roadmap for optimisation
And the learning has not stopped there. Thanks to the findings from CFlight, it has been possible to refine the methodology of our planning tool, Advanced Campaign Hub — ensuring our post-campaign validation is coherent with the pre-campaign planning solution.
Bringing CFlight under joint-industry governance also means that buyers and sellers can contribute to shaping the future of the tool by collectively specifying the next wave of developments.
A roadmap for the optimisation of CFlight has been identified, with the objective of extending coverage of VOD services and enhancing reporting capabilities. Building on the work to upgrade the Advanced Campaign Hub, we are in conversation with streaming services to include their ad tiers in CFlight reporting.
Finally, by taking CFlight on the road and listening to existing and new users, we found a desire for a new modern-looking interface where both our pre-campaign planning and post-campaign evaluation tools can be accessed.
We have therefore just launched a new tender for the Barb Total Campaign Reporting Suite, which will host both Advanced Campaign Hub and CFlight, and will deliver end-to-end analysis capability for a full cycle of campaign optimisation across linear and VOD services.
The last six months have been quite eventful for CFlight — and I don’t expect the next six to be any different.
Luca Vannini is head of campaign audiences at Barb
Barb extends total campaign planning to include Netflix and Discovery+