Barb, the UK’s joint industry committee (JIC) for TV measurement, has today launched Barb Ads Hub, a new analytics system built by RSMB which will cover both pre-campaign planning and post-campaign reporting across linear and on-demand services.
The new product brings together two existing tools, Barb’s Advanced Campaign Hub and CFlight, into one unified interface, something which Barb says the industry has been hungry for. Within this hub, users will be able to run both standardised and custom reports with “advanced data-visualisation capabilities”, according to Barb. The system also supports automated requests via API, enabling ingestion into proprietary tools.
CFlight and Advanced Campaign Hub are very complementary products, since both combine linear and streaming audience data, but each covers a different point of the campaign cycle. But they’ve had very different routes to market: Advanced Campaign Hub was developed internally, while CFlight was initially introduced into the UK by Sky Media, before Barb took over its running back in 2023. Hence they’ve previously sat as separate tools. When Barb first announced ten months ago that it planned to launch a unified interface, the company said that doing so would make life easier for TV buyers who use both tools, while also speeding up the rollout of new capabilities.
“Barb Ads Hub is uniquely designed to support full-cycle campaign optimisation, providing something for everyone from planners to those evaluating effectiveness,” said Luca Vannini, Barb’s head of campaign audiences, speaking about today’s launch. “Our Trustmark guarantees that all audience data in the system has been compiled and reported in accordance with joint-industry standards of objectivity, transparency and accountability. And it’s all housed in one modern and user-friendly interface, which enables the smooth ingestion of outputs into clients’ own systems.”
Further upgrades on the way
Vannini added that today’s launch is “just the start”, with further developments planned for the coming months.
Coinciding with the launch of Barb Ads Hub, the company has introduced several upgrades to CFlight. Reporting against eleven additional target audiences, including houseperson audiences and a wider array of age groups, has been enables. Its coverage of BVOD services has also been extended, with TNT Sports and Sky AVOD platforms now covered, and STV to follow later in Q1. Vannini added that Barb will be speaking with other players in the streaming space as it looks to integrate their services into CFlight reporting.
Looking ahead, beyond the obvious step of integrating pre-campaign planning, Barb says it will introduce the ability to delineate campaign results by sales house, and to request analysis for campaigns which only run on on-demand services. Later this year, a new marketing mix modelling (MMM) data pack will be made available within CFlight, allowing clients to access campaign exposure data across linear and VOD in a single location, which they can then bring into their models.
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