asiCast 128: UK broadcasters adopt CFlight

Posted by asi on 1st July 2021

A significant development has been announced in the UK, with commercial TV broadcasters collaborating to develop Sky’s CFlight as an industry-wide campaign evaluation tool, providing advertisers consistent, accurate measurement across all platforms and all types of viewing.

There has already been a great deal of interest from broadcasters in many other markets as to how this has been achieved. In this asiCast, our Research Director Richard Marks speaks with Lucy Bristowe, Director of Insight and Research at Sky Media, and Harry Ullman, Special Projects Lead at RSMB, about how the project works.

CFlight combines BARB data and ad server impression data to estimate campaign reach and frequency. One source measures people and the other measures machines so what is needed to turn the broadcasters’ BVOD streaming data into people? The hardest part of this type of measurement is usually the deduplication of reach. Richard asks Harry to explain statistical techniques and the data sources used in developing this process.

These are early days for this important initiative and we put to Lucy the potential for future developments, including the possibility of incorporating data from other online video such as YouTube or Facebook. Could the development of CFlight be compatible with the WFA Cross-Media initiative and specifically the UK pilot, Project Origin?

Sky’s adoption of CFlight was presented by Lucy to our International Television & Video Conference in Prague in 2019 and Phil Smith, Director General of ISBA, announced the launch of Origin at the same event. We shall be looking for an update of the progress both are making at this year’s virtual event in the first week of November.

One point that was made a number of times at last year’s event was that there is a great deal of activity from broadcasters globally in developing techniques to measure video across all devices to meet some of the demands of advertisers. This collaborative venture by the UK’s commercial broadcasters is an important and no doubt influential example of that. You can get an idea of the work in progress elsewhere from this useful account of developments in hybrid audience measurement that has recently been published by egta.

You can view a presentation about this new cross-broadcaster measurement tool here.

The asi 2021 Virtual Conference will be held on 1st to 5th November. Details will released soon.

Lucy Bristowe and Harry Ullman talk with Richard Marks: