In a significant step forward for AV media, the three largest UK commercial broadcasters ITV, C4 and Sky have come together to create broadcaster CFlight for the UK, the world’s first cross media metric measuring tool of its sophistication and scale. CFlight was originally developed by Comcast owned NBC in the USA and initially adapted by Sky for use across its own portfolio prior to being applied across all UK Broadcasters.
Pioneered as a post campaign evaluation tool, CFlight combines TV impacts provided by BARB and census level broadcaster BVoD data provided by each sales house to answer three critical questions-
- How many people did my TV and BVOD campaign reach?
- What is the average frequency of the campaign?
- What is the reach contribution for the BVOD element of my campaign?
UM view:
With the continued fragmentation of TV viewing, we have always understood the power of running BVoD alongside TV and the incremental gains this approach can offer. However, for the first time, CFlight will give us the ability to provide tangible metrics of exactly how a campaign has performed across TV, BVoD and combined across the two as it dedupes the data using a calculation methodology created by the highly respected TV audience statisticians RSMB. This will allow for a greater understanding of the optimal budget split between TV and VOD for brand awareness activity.
Excitingly this will enable BVOD viewing across all devices to be evaluated alongside that on TV sets – a crucial step given the significant increase in BVOD usage via tablet and mobile. For brands targeting a younger audience this will be extremely valuable, but with viewing habits changing across all audiences is likely to become essential for all advertisers in the coming years.
What’s next?
The CFlight tool is planned to launch later this year, and, initially we will be limited to reporting against an all-adults audience only.CFlight plan, however, to roll out updates across 2022 which will include reporting reach against all the main TV buying audiences, BVOD only campaigns, and even regional insights.
While linear activity is published for all with a Neilson subscription to see (enabling analysis of competitor TVRs, channel mix, daypart strategy etc), CFlight reports will only be available to those buying the campaigns.
In the meantime:
It’s worth noting that all the data and reporting will be handled by TechEdge and, although the CFlight reporting tool is yet to launch, we here at UM already have access to the TechEdge planning tool which gives us the ability to plan the performance of any potential TV+BVoD campaign.
