Left to right: Dylan Davenport, Jungle Creations; Chris Williams, Publicis Media Exchange UK; Lucy Bristowe, Sky; Mark Trinder, ITV
BARB, the TV audience measurement system, is failing to keep up with the demands of the marketplace as agencies and advertisers shift investment to follow eyeballs, the boss of Publicis Media’s trading and investment wing has said.
Speaking during an Advertising Week panel on Monday, Chris Williams, CEO of Publicis Media Exchange (PMX), said: “I don’t think the measurement systems, such as BARB, are moving quickly enough. Project Dovetail […] will be great when it arrives, but it needs to be in the marketplace now.”
The first stage of Project Dovetail successfully launched in September last year after years of development, with new measurement capabilities covering TV sets, tablets, PCs and smartphones for on demand and live streaming.
As of now, the project covers ‘programme average audiences’, which reveals the number of people watching programmes across the four screens. However, further stages have yet to be launched – including cross-device campaign measurement.
Asked whether the current market pricing model is sustainable with TV impacts dropping despite inflating cost, Williams said: “if you’re just looking at BARB reported linear TV impressions, you’re going to see a high cost inflation and a challenge to build reach as effectively as you could do. But that’s not taking into account what’s happening on-demand.”
Williams added that once a measurement and attribution tool “fit for purpose” is built, any “alarm bells” that are ringing based on Ebiquity’s ‘TV at the Tipping Point?’ report – which said TV is at risk of losing its ROI advantage within the next three years – will be dispelled.
However, Lucy Bristowe, head of insights and research at Sky and BARB board member, said that campaign measurement will not be available on Project Dovetail before 2020.
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“It is a technical and very expensive solution […] because we are looking at very rigorous standards for the gold standard currency,” she said. “But we will get there.”
A BARB spokesperson later told Mediatel that there are “dualities” to the challenge of providing a trusted audience measurement service.
“The industry wants us to innovate while maintaining a stable currency, and it wants us to be fast and right; we can’t always be both and being right is paramount,” BARB said, adding that its next priority for Project Dovetail is to deliver unduplicated reach of programmes and ads across multiple screens.
Meanwhile, Williams also stressed the importance of the development of a cross-platform measurement tool, as the inability to look at cost-effectiveness in a comparable way paints an inaccurate picture of the advertising landscape.
“If you look at cost per completed view, Google and Facebook are [more] expensive compared to broadcaster VoD. I don’t think that’s widely known,” he said.
“[At the moment], agencies like [Publicis Media] have to hack it and create our own ability to measure.”
In December last year, a multi-million pound trading dispute between commercial TV broadcaster Channel 4 and Publicis Media saw the advertising network pull its clients’ ads from across the broadcaster’s portfolio of channels.
The dispute was resolved early in 2019, with the network’s media agencies, including Starcom, Spark Foundry and Zenith, resuming trading with Channel 4 last month.
