Barb, the UK’s primary TV measurement body, has announced this morning that it has begun looking for a new chief executive, as current CEO Justin Sampson has decided to step down from the role during 2026.
Sampson has seen enormous change in the UK TV advertising industry since he took the helm in 2012 — change which has required Barb to adapt the ways it measures TV content, and broaden the range of content it measures. His successor will be charged with continuing this work, ensuring that Barb’s measurement and reporting of linear, streaming, and video sharing services continue to fit the needs of advertisers, while ensuring that Barb’s measurement fairly represents the sell-side. In a statement, Barb says that current strategic priorities include extending the use of device data, enabling full-cycle campaign optimisation for linear and streaming services through Barb Ads Hub, and modernising data distribution.
“It’s not often people say it is a really exciting time to be leaving a job,” said Sampson. “It’s been such a privilege to be part of Barb’s evolution over the last decade or so. And given the strong appeal of solving the next wave of challenges, I can’t find the right words to describe how difficult the decision was to step down next year. If I was ten years younger, my hat would be in the ring to be the next chief executive.”
A radically changed landscape
When Sampson took the role back in 2012, he faced a wildly different landscape from the one his successor will be met with. TV viewing was still massively concentrated on linear TV, with just 29 percent of the population watching catch-up TV via the internet, and 22 percent streaming TV online (compared to 97 percent of the adult population who watched TV via a TV set). TV viewership was on the rise across age groups. Netflix had only just launched in the UK earlier that year. On YouTube, Korean musician PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’ became the first video to reach one billion views.
The explosion of online video, the launch of a number of new streaming services by the UK’s public service broadcasters and a range of international challengers, and the fragmentation of TV viewership across devices and platforms that has taken place over the past 14 years has required fundamental changes to the ways TV is measured. It’s a challenge which has often proven challenging for the established TV measurement bodies, as Nielsen’s highly publicised struggles in the US a few years back showed.
Chief among the initiatives launched under Sampson in response to these changes has been the development and launch of Project Dovetail, Barb’s initiative to measure TV content across platforms and devices, using a mix of panel data and census-level data drawn from devices and the broadcasters themselves. Two years ago, Barb also took over the running of CFlight, a cross-platform measurement solution which now sits alongside Barb’s own pre-campaign planning service. More recently, the measurement body has been looking at folding large datasets into its regular TV set-based audience measurement.
Sampson’s time in charge has also seen Barb expand the range of content it measures, from reporting on the international subscription streaming services, to measuring content viewership on YouTube. This shift has been so core to Barb’s operation that it rebranded back in 2023, moving from ‘BARB’ to ‘Barb Audiences’, a name change designed to signal the company’s increased remit to measure TV-like content wherever it sits.
Nigel Sharrocks, chairman of Barb, paid tribute to Sampson’s “outstanding leadership” over the past 14 years. “While it’s clearly a time of incredible change for our industry, his passion combined with commitments to transparency, collaboration and industry standards leaves Barb in great shape and well positioned for the challenges ahead.”
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