BARB, the television audience measurement organisation for the United Kingdom, has integrated its viewing data with that from IPA Touchpoints. It will provide a more comprehensive picture about people who watch programmes and advertisements. BARB customers that also subscribe to Touchpoints will be able to classify audiences in more ways, not just sociodemographic categories, benefiting schedulers and media planners.
BARB daily audience data can now be analysed by IPA Touchpoints classifications. This will improve planning for media agencies. Broadcasters can use the fused data to improve their offering to advertisers and help with their scheduling. It will also help show how television fits in with other media use.
“This new initiative creates an extensive range of target audiences that IPA TouchPoints subscribers can use to plan and account for their investment in television commercials and programmes,” said Justin Sampson, the chief executive of BARB.
Belinda Beeftink, the research director at the IPA explained: “IPA TouchPoints delivers a 360-degree view of how different media fit into people’s daily lives. For many years the TouchPoints Channel Planner has integrated the industry media currencies, including BARB, into an analytics tool that supports cross-media planning and buying.”
Incorporated by Royal Charter, the role of the IPA is to advance the value, theory and practice of advertising, media and marketing communications, to promote best practice standards in these fields, and to ensure that the work it does will benefit the public, the wider business community and the national economy.
IPA TouchPoints is a unique, consumer-focused, cross-media, cross-device database that has been produced in response to the needs of the communications industry to allow them to plan and evaluate cross-media campaigns.
TouchPoints Daily Life data is based on a representative sample of around 6,000 adults aged 15 or over living in Great Britain. It is collected by each respondent keeping a diary detailing their activities on a half hourly basis over a seven-day period and completing a questionnaire covering attitudes, product ownership, shopping, and media behaviour.
Data from TouchPoints research show that British adults are consuming 8 hours and 11 minutes of all media a day, including television, radio, social networking or messaging, internet, and cinema. They show that Netflix is watched by 29% of adults reach week, nd that midday on Friday is the most popular time for feeling positive.
As the TouchPoints research does not cover children or those living in Northern Ireland, these audiences have been excluded from the data integration.
Respondent-level questionnaire data, together with summarised diary data, have been added to BARB panellists that are demographically similar, to provide a fused dataset which will be updated quarterly.
This means that the richer IPA TouchPoints classifications can be used to analyse BARB daily audience data. For example, a media agency representing a smartphone manufacturer could enhance an existing audience aged 16-34 by overlaying information on their income and existing smartphone usage and look at which BARB-reported channels they are mostly likely to watch. This could then be factored into planned advertising or sponsorship opportunities.
BARB has also recently introduced a new content identification system to ensure the consistency of programme title and genre reporting and to link linear and broadcast online video programming across platforms.
The new content ID system, which is operated by MetaBroadcast on behalf of BARB, is now the sole source of programme information.
Programme titles are standardised within and across channels. All content is placed within a hierarchy, meaning that individual episodes are accurately linked to a programme. All programmes are independently assigned with a standard BARB genre, according to industry-agreed rules. Broadcast and online programming is linked across platforms.