Sky is aiming to boost its appeal to brand owners by adopting a new tool to improve audience data for its advertisers, as part of parent company Comcast’s plans to sweat the business following last year’s $40bn (£31bn) acquisition.
The broadcasting giant will implement CFlight, a cross-platform measurement scheme created last year by Comcast’s NBCUniversal division, which captures live, on-demand and time-shifted commercial impressions on every viewing platform.
It will be the first time CFlight has been used outside the US, with NBCUniversal claiming that the roll-out will bring the industry closer to a global standard in measurement. Sky Media will implement the scheme in the UK in the autumn, followed by further expansion across Sky’s European territories in 2020.
Sky is also in early discussions with ITV and Channel 4, to get them to adopt CFlight, although insists it remains committed to the BARB measurement scheme, whose data is included in CFlight.
Sky Media managing director John Litster said: “We need to make sure it’s easy for advertisers to track and measure their money with us. With CFlight, we can give advertisers consistent, accurate measurement across all platforms and types of viewing – a first for the UK. We also continue to support the mission of BARB in the UK to deliver an industry-wide view.”
NBCUniversal executive vice president of strategic insights and analytics Kavita Vazirani explained that as the metric is open-source, the methodology that CFlight uses to measure ad impressions is totally transparent, meaning the companies which use it are not “grading their own homework”.
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