BARB Puts Five Contracts Out to Tender

UK television audience measurement body BARB has issued a refreshed invitation to tender, covering five research contracts, as it looks to keep pace with changes in television viewing including the ongoing development of SVOD services and the roll-out of 5G mobile networks.

BARB's contracts collect and analyse data that represent the viewing behaviour of the UK's 28 million television and broadband-only households, and its currency is used by broadcasters, advertisers and agencies to evaluate the success of their campaigns and investment. Research focuses on five questions: Who is watching? What are they watching? When are they watching? Which screen are they watching on? How did the content get to the screen?

The latest news follows BARB's announcement in July that it would be extending by a year the tender process for two of its main research contracts, as a result of the pandemic. The five new tenders cover Audience measurement panel & data collection; Survey design, methodology and auditing; Recruitment for panel setup; Broadcaster video-on-demand (BVOD) census data collection; and Auditing of BVOD data collection.

Recent BARB upgrades have included methods to measure the use of broadcaster video-on-demand (BVOD) services on tablets, PCs and smartphones; pre-broadcast, non-linear and catch-up viewing up to 28 days after broadcast on TV sets; and dynamically-served advertising. The organisation's cross-screen program viewing figures are generated by combining the data from its own panel with the census data collected from viewing on non-TV devices, in a process called Dovetail Fusion. The contracts tendered today represent the collection processes for both these datasets.

CEO Justin Sampson (pictured) comments: 'BARB's trusted audience measurement currency relies on two high-quality data sources. People-based viewing figures - collected from a representative panel of UK homes - are complemented by a census dataset of viewing to BVOD services. The tender process is designed to identify best-in-class solutions that deliver the versatility to track people's viewing behaviour throughout the 2020s'.

Three key research contracts are not included in the tender process: Establishment Survey & panel recruitment (currently IPSOS), Dovetail Fusion data integration (Kantar), and provision of a content identification system (MetaBroadcast).

Further information is available from justin.sampson@barb.co.uk .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.