BARB Urges TV Industry to Join Data Group

UK television measurement body BARB has called for those involved in the industry to join a new working group, with the aim of co-ordinating the use of data and further developing the potential for TV measurement.

BARB (Broadcasters' Audience Research Board) - which is a not-for-profit company owned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, BSkyB and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising - provides in-home TV viewing measurement for the UK, obtained from a panel of 5,100 homes which return data from around 11,500 viewers.

In the summer, the organisation announced the roll-out of a viewing meter which promises measurement of TV viewed via a PC or laptop.

The new 'BARB Measurement Sciences Forum' has been launched by CEO Bjarne Thelin, to encourage the TV and ad industries to bring together their data sources and to prevent the circulation of separate, incompatible data sets.

While BARB is a survey organisation, Thelin says that it may need more involvement in activities of data aggregation, or data mining, to help formulate the industry approach.

'We see it as important to prioritise ways in which types of viewing as reported by BARB can be matched with batches of server data and activity logs that are, in all likelihood, held by lots of different organisations,' he explains. 'And probably not shared, either because organisations won't share, because of business issues, or can't share, because of data privacy.'

Thelin warns that unless the TV industry perseveres with producing common standards and definitions for integrating this server data into BARB's own data, the industry could end up in a state of 'enlightened confusion': 'Enlightened because we'll have lots more data, but confused because we'll have lost some of the basic meaning of it,' he adds.

Web site: www.barb.co.uk .