You now have to be of a certain vintage to remember when television was just one box with a handful of channels competing for our attention. Now, of course, we’re in a world of YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, BT Vision, Sky and all the rest. You can watch television when, where and how you want, over any number of platforms and providers. Traditional viewing now represents only 50 percent of total U.K. viewing in the crucial 16-24 age bracket. Video on demand, streaming and short-form clips make up the rest.
This change has been a huge challenge for television advertising. Slots have been traditionally bought and sold using numbers supplied by BARB, which monitors the television habits of a small sample of viewers in the U.K. and uses the data to estimate what the whole country has been watching.
But now that people no longer have to tune in at a specific time to catch a programme, this one-time gold standard has become blunt and out-dated. Instead sophisticated new audience data streams are becoming the order of the day. BARB itself talks about a “hybrid future” and recently launched a new scheme to include data from online devices.
