LONDON – Key players in UK commercial TV are gearing up to adopt NBCUniversal’s CFlight currency metric for cross-platform advertising.
Sky, ITV and Channel 4 will each adopt the standard.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Olivia Abraham, VP, Commercial Accounts, The Addressable Platform, ITV, explains why it is so important.
Total-TV view
“The industry keenly awaits the launch this year. There’s a huge of excitement around it,” she tells Beet.TV editorial advisor Jon Watts.
“It’s one of the largest developments in measurement across the UK broadcast industry for many, many years.
“It has been designed directly to answer that clear need from advertisers to deliver this total-TV view of audience reach.”
CFlight’s Trojan Horse
Sky, NBCU Get Ever-Closer On TV Ad Innovations: Sky’s Litster
Comcast’s NBCUniversal acquired Sky in 2018. Since then, the pair announced the merger of NBCUniversal’s Audience Studio with Sky’s AdSmart, a pioneering addressable TV advertising system.
Then they announced that Sky Media Sales, Sky’s ad sales house, would begin using NBCU’s CFlight unified advertising metric.
That has been the Trojan Horse for CFlight. Last summer, Sky convinced ITV and Channel 4 to join in with adopting the standard, with BT Sport said to follow in 2022.. It will combine UK TV measurement group BARB’s linear TV viewing data with impressions from Sky Q, ITV Hub and All 4.
Driving scale
ITV and Channel 4 each now sell programmatic ads through their own, broadcaster-VOD (BVOD) players. ITV’s own system for doing so, Planet V, has been going gangbusters.
For ITV’s Abraham, it’s all about to pay off.
“It’s a huge undertaking,” she admits. “Clearly the work is very hard, but that collaboration is really starting to come through and it’s exciting.
“(Our partnership with Sky) will enable ITV to deliver more addressable advertising through Planet V on more Sky platforms than ever before.
“You are going to start to see more of that kind of new wave of collaboration between broadcasters.”
Buyers in the mix
She says ad agencies, too, have rolled their sleeves up to embrace CFlight.
“They are the ones who’ve been delivering this message on behalf of their clients for so long.
“They get to be involved in shaping both the near term and future states of C-Flight and hopefully to pilot the programme this year.
“C-Flight feels like it’s created building blocks of different type of collaboration and innovation among broadcasters.”
You are watching “Advanced TV Advertising in the UK: The Next Three Years,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Finecast. For more videos, please visit this page.
