BARB Hires for New Research Ops Director Role

UK TV audience measurement body BARB has hired Caroline Baxter for the newly created role of Research Operations Director, and will recruit an Audiences Director to work with her. The creation of these two roles follows the resignation of Research Director Simon Bolus.

BARB is responsible for delivering the UK's television audience ratings, both for advertisers and to support decisions about the making and distribution of TV programmes. The organization now reports pre-broadcast, live and post-broadcast viewing up to 28 days; viewing on TV sets, tablets, PCs and smartphones; and viewing on SVOD and video-sharing services. BARB has also established Dovetail Fusion which each day integrates its panel data with big data collected from broadcasters' VOD services.

Baxter (pictured) joins from Kantar, where she latterly served as Program Director UK & EMEA, before which she was Global Operations Transformation Leader, with a remit to implement a business model for how the company works across its offers and divisions - and earlier still she was Kantar's Head of UK and Ireland, Data Collection. During her time with the business, her role included managing recruitment for the representative panel of homes built for the BARB contract that began in 2010.

At BARB, Baxter will be responsible for ensuring that the organisation's research contractors deliver on their commitments, working closely with the new Audiences Director. The creation of the two roles follows the resignation of Bolus, who joined BARB in 2003 from Zenith Media. As Head of Research at Zenith he had worked on the UK Television Forecast report, and served as both the IPA's representative on BARB's Technical Advisory Group and as Chairman of the IPA's own Television Research Advisory Group.

CEO Justin Sampson comments: 'Simon has been the guardian of ensuring we do things properly as we evolve our gold-standard reporting of audiences. Given everything we have achieved during his time with us, he leaves with our deep gratitude and best wishes for what he decides to do next. We're delighted to welcome Caroline to BARB. Her strengths and expertise will be invaluable as we continue to deliver audience measurement services that are underpinned by two of the UK's largest ongoing research contracts'.

Web site: www.barb.co.uk .