Barb has awarded three contracts for its audience measurement service: metadata and interim overnight programme logs to MetaBroadcast and interim overnight commercial spot logs to Clearcast.
All of the contracts commence in January 2025 and will run for three years.
“MetaBroadcast is delighted to continue supporting Barb by leveraging the robust metadata management capabilities of Atlas, our cloud-based active data platform, and by now working with premier global metadata provider Gracenote to improve content ID coverage and classification,” said Jamie Mackinlay, CEO, MetaBroadcast. “We recognise the importance of accurate, consistent, and timely programme data that allows Barb to fulfill the needs of its audience measurement customer base. We look forward to continuing our collaboration.”
Barb has also appointed MetaBroadcast and Clearcast for new contracts to deliver interim overnight programme and commercial spot logs respectively. Both logs will be available at 9am, to be used alongside the overnight ratings for most Barb-reported channels. They will be confirmed after eight days by the logs provided by broadcasters, as in the current system.
Caroline Baxter, Barb’s Research Operations Director, said: “We look forward to working with MetaBroadcast and Clearcast to enhance our audience measurement service. Together, these contracts will provide faster and more comprehensive reporting of programmes and ads, giving advertisers, agencies and broadcasters earlier insight into how their programmes and campaigns are performing.”
MetaBroadcast will now use Gracenote schedule metadata and unique content identifiers to reduce timescales for accurate programme identification, validation, enrichment and genre classification, as well as improve coverage and accuracy of broadcaster IDs. The inclusion of Gracenote will also allow Barb to better deduplicate content and accelerate reporting from seven days to three days after programmes are first made available on linear channels or streaming services.