Taking the wheel: Data ownership and the future of TV measurement
Opinion
The launch of Barb Ads Hub is just the start of a journey to evolve TV campaign planning and optimisation in line with industry practices. Barb’s head of campaign audiences explains.
The advertising industry has never had more data. It has rarely felt less in control of it. After years in which the industry has, in effect, been a passenger in someone else’s vehicle when it comes to data, the question of who is at the wheel is becoming impossible to ignore.
The rise of streaming has reinvigorated TV advertising, with traditional broadcasters every bit as active in the revival as the newer entrants. Broadcasters have long offered their own on-demand platforms, and ad-supported tiers are now mainstream across the major streaming services too — and across both, the precision of data-driven targeting is bringing new force to a format whose emotional power once seemed threatened by digital.
Many of the newer entrants have also engaged constructively with joint-industry measurement, recognising that shared, transparent standards serve the whole market.
The harder problem lies elsewhere.
As the IPA’s Signals in the Noise 2 paper puts it, the industry’s increasing dependence on proprietary data from the major tech and social platforms is leaving advertisers and agencies navigating a mosaic of incompatible, opaque datasets.
The FT’s recent Future of Marketing report makes the same point from a different angle: more than two-thirds of UK media spend now flows directly to tech platforms, and in too many cases these companies are simultaneously setting the rules and marking their own homework.
AI raises the stakes further still. When artificial intelligence is making planning and optimisation decisions at speed and scale in closed environments, the quality and provenance of the data feeding those models matters more than ever. Let alone any question of a potential audit of outputs.
This is the context in which the question of who controls the data the industry can trust — and how it flows through the ecosystem — becomes a strategic imperative, not a technical footnote.
The thought first occurred to me on a long drive abroad, watching cars of every vintage share the same motorway. It struck me that even the best fuel can only do so much when the engine it’s powering is a generation behind.
For a long time, Barb has produced exceptional fuel for the industry — methodologically rigorous, independently audited, currency-grade viewing data — but with limited control over where that fuel ended up or in what condition it arrived.
The data distribution model that had served the industry well for decades was beginning to feel ill-suited to the pace and complexity of modern measurement. Meanwhile, the tech platforms have been building their own data pipelines as a strategic asset.
Barb’s response has been to do the same — but on fundamentally different terms. The Barb Data Hub brings data distribution in-house, centralising access to TV audience data and giving Barb data users greater flexibility over how to access it. It is the foundation: a single place where trusted viewing data is gathered, managed and made available to the industry.
Sitting atop it is Barb Ads Hub, the interface through which users access campaign data in the format they need.
Since January, Barb Ads Hub has provided a comprehensive campaign reporting system for the TV advertising market, with pre- and post-campaign analysis in one place, consistent methodologies, and consistent results. Alongside a modern dashboard, Barb Ads Hub reporting can be requested and exported via an API, for frictionless ingestion into agencies’ proprietary planning solutions.
By providing something for everyone at all stages of the campaign planning and reporting cycle, Barb Ads Hub has quickly become the principal destination for over 600 UK buyers and sellers of advertising for full-cycle campaign optimisation, with all data compiled and reported in line with joint-industry standards.
Is Barb Ads Hub a walled garden?
All of which raises a fair question: is Barb now building a closed shop? And what is the difference from the walled-garden solutions provided by the platforms? There are some important distinctions which ensure Barb Ads Hub isn’t a walled garden.
This is, critically, a joint-industry endeavour. Unlike the pure tech and social platforms — which set their own rules, define their own metrics and validate their own results — Barb operates under shared governance.
No single company decides the methodology. No commercial relationship dilutes the rigour. No participant sees transparency as an inconvenient constraint.
We also believe that data analytics businesses and consultancies remain an essential part of the ecosystem, and a competitive market for data analytics services is something Barb actively supports.
Our data distribution strategy is designed to shift where that competition happens: away from who can best wrangle respondent-level data into usable form, and towards who can provide the best analysis, data visualisation and strategic counsel on top of it.
And while providing choice in how to access Barb data remains an important principle for us, we also need to recognise the importance of users receiving the same answer to the same question, particularly when first-party data is integrated into our reporting.
The launch of Barb Ads Hub is just the start of a journey to evolve TV campaign planning and optimisation in line with industry practices. To ensure that our data reflects all ad formats – both mass and addressable – three areas in particular are shaping our development priorities.
Media agencies have told us that getting Barb data into mixed media modelling has been harder than it should be. We’ve listened. An MMM data pack that surfaces impact data across linear channels and VOD platforms in an easy-to-use format will be available in the Barb Ads Hub in Q3.
Many TV planning tools have been shaped by linear practices that remain relevant but aren’t always applicable to addressable activity. Working with broadcasters, streamers, media agencies and advertisers, we’re specifying developments that will modernise how addressable activity is planned.
Finally, we’re bringing streaming services into our post-campaign analysis. The work to integrate Amazon Prime Video is already underway — a significant milestone for joint-industry measurement.
The broader lesson from this platform era is that data infrastructure is not a neutral utility. It shapes what gets measured, what gets valued and ultimately where money flows. The joint-industry model — open, transparent, shared — is the alternative to a measurement landscape carved up between competing proprietary systems. At a moment when the industry is renegotiating its relationship with platforms, AI and the nature of effectiveness itself, that alternative has never mattered more.
The joint-industry model produces exceptional fuel for the industry. Modernised data distribution allows that fuel to power vehicles built for the journey ahead. Now is the moment for the buy-side, supported by a jointly governed ecosystem, to take the wheel — and set the direction of travel.
Luca Vannini is the head of campaign audiences at Barb