Barb fast-tracks strategic objectives with new COO appointment

Barb, the industry’s standard for understanding what people watch, today announced it has promoted Caroline Baxter to Chief Operating Officer. Working alongside Justin Sampson, Chief Executive, she will be responsible for ensuring progress on Barb’s strategic priorities to extend Barb’s reporting of total campaign performance, extend measurement of total viewing across all streaming services and future-proof Barb’s data access.

Caroline’s priorities for this year include delivering significant developments across new metering technology for Barb’s reporting panel, due to expand across 7,000 UK homes or approximately 16,000 people. This is the largest-ever increase in reporting sample since Barb’s launch in 1981 and is part of Barb’s multi-year contracts, which run until the end of 2029. These are key to delivering strategic developments via Barb’s principal research agency partners Kantar, Ipsos and RSMB.

Since joining in 2022, Caroline has been responsible for synthesising what suppliers can deliver with evolving data requirements from subscribers. In her expanded role, she will take on more organisational leadership duties, alongside her existing management of the in-house research and data science team.

Since 2022, Caroline has been Research Operations Director at Barb, and prior to that she worked at Kantar for many years, where her final role was Media Program Director UK & EMEA.

Justin Sampson, Chief Executive at Barb said:

“Our most recent customer-satisfaction survey shows confidence in Barb’s ability to deal with the future has reached a new high watermark. This bears testimony to the great progress we’ve made in delivering an audience-centric measurement strategy. Since joining, Caroline has brought a tangible energy and focus to how the Barb team brings service developments to market. The Barb board didn’t hesitate in its support of her promotion.”

Caroline Baxter said:

“Our goal is to deliver a comprehensive and trusted measurement of viewing, regardless of delivery platform, for our subscribers. I’m proud to step into this new role, building on my work over the last two years, to lead delivery of the next generation of TV viewing measurement.”

Building on recent achievements, Barb’s strategic priorities this year include:

1. Enhancing core services through increased investment in its high-quality balanced 7,000 UK homes panel and further integration of a variety of new data sources. This work continues in Spring 2024, when Barb starts a process to evolve Dovetail Fusion into a more sophisticated combination of panel data and big data. This will support first-party data ingest from online platforms, broadcasters and advertisers.

2. Extending measurement of total viewing across all streaming services, including subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) and video-sharing services which has been the catalyst for Disney+ and Netflix signing up to join Barb. Barb is now exploring ways of reporting all content on video-sharing platforms that is produced in line with industry-accepted standards of brand safety.

3. Extend total campaign reporting a process which has already started this year through evolving CFlight into a joint-industry solution for reporting total campaign performance across linear and streaming services. As part of Barb’s joint-industry reporting of audiences, it intends to expand the number of services included in CFlight and the Advanced Campaign Hub.

CFlight is complementary to Barb’s Advanced Campaign Hub, which provides pre-campaign planning analysis across linear channels and broadcaster video-on-demand (BVOD) services, including budget optimisation. Together, these audience-reporting tools enable media buyers to conduct end-to-end analysis of total campaign performance across linear channels and BVOD services.

4. Enhancing data access to future-proof Barb’s data strategy. Last year, Barb upgraded an API, to give its clients more flexibility accessing Barb viewing data and to integrate it into proprietary tools and systems.