BARB

Our Broadcaster Services Unit is responsible for the BARB Establishment Survey and the BARB Programme Attribution Service. These surveys play a major part in the planning and trading of national airtime and space, to the tune of several billions of pounds.

We won the contract to run the BARB Television Establishment Survey in 2000. Before that, we were subcontracted to conduct 50% of the Establishment Survey and recruit The BARB Measurement Panel.

The Establishment Survey has three main objectives:

• to establish television ownership and reception, ownership and usage of TV-related equipment and detailed demographic information for households and individuals in each ITV area and BBC region, and measure the penetration and reception method of multi-channel homes and individual channel penetration
• to obtain the necessary targets to control the BARB panel
• to provide a master sample of households with known characteristics from which the panel is maintained.

The universe is defined as all permanent residents in private households in the UK. The interview is conducted using CAPI and may be administered with either the housewife or the head of household (or both).

An annual sample is selected and this is then divided into twelve monthly replicates. The design is such that monthly samples support network reporting and quarterly samples support full regional reporting. Over 56,000 interviews are conducted per year, which includes a Welsh boost for S4C.

We won the BARB Programme Attribution Service in 2001. This is an integral part of the BARB Audience Measurement contract and has the following objectives:

• to provide a programme numbering system
• to allocate genre codes to all the programmes reported by the BARB Measurement System
• to provide a single agreed name for each programme.

The contract involves managing a complex programme database. Daily post-transmission logs are compiled by the broadcasters. This information is used to update the database and provide a definitive list of the programmes that were transmitted. The system has been devised so as to be flexible, with provision for extending the type of genre-based analyses that can be carried out.

These contracts are run by experienced project managers skilled in running complex projects. They work as an integrate part of the media team, ensuring that all the newest initiatives and ideas are shared and our research remains cutting edge.