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Sky is at the forefront of Europe’s broadcast entertainment industry, serving 22.5m customers across seven countries, including the UK, Ireland, Germany, Italy and Spain. It spends £6bn a year on programming and generates annual revenues of around £13bn.

While a sizeable proportion of its income is generated by subscriptions to its ‘linear’ (traditional broadcast) TV and digital services, much of it is made up of advertising revenues. This is where Sky Media comes in – the company’s dedicated ad-sales arm that works with agencies and brands looking for exposure across TV, online and on-the-go.

“It is the job of my team to find innovative solutions to measure the effectiveness across either one or all of these platforms,” explains Lucy Bristowe, head of insight and research at Sky Media. “It’s no longer enough to find customers who are exposed to messages by asking them outright, through traditional means. We have to be smarter than that.”

Being smarter has helped shape Sky Media’s approach to research internally, but the organisation is increasingly combining its own data with that of third-party-generated research. “We still need traditional research that gives us insight into the ‘why’ behind the behaviour that leads to an action,” says Bristowe.

“For example, when researching changing viewing behaviours and consumption, it was a diary study that gave us insight into why video on demand (VoD) was so engaging – watching with others, watching content when they want, on a big screen, when in a certain mindset. Data alone can’t tell us that.”

Modest but hard-hitting

Reporting to Sky Media managing director John Litster, Bristowe is something of a Sky veteran, having joined the company in May 2005 from Channel 4, where she was head of research. She has held several research posts at Sky, including on the content side of the business for a couple of years.

Given the size of the TV marketplace and the plethora of challenges faced by traditional players, Bristowe’s 12-strong team may be big by some organisations’ standards, but the scale of its remit is broad.

“We’re covering a lot of ground,” she says. “We’re not only commissioning research, we’re using internal data sources to create insight and stories for our sales teams, and conducting research across our suite of products, such as Sky AdVance and Sky AdSmart.”

Sky AdVance works with cross-platform ad campaigns and aggregates viewing data from Sky households on its viewing panels with either a programme, ad spot or sponsorship. AdSmart encapsulates the scope of Sky’s research, marrying the traditional – brand TV advertising – with digital technology. In part a response to the migration of advertisers to more targeted digital advertising, it was launched in 2013. Using Sky subscriber data, it allows brands of all sizes to target specific households with bespoke messages at a fraction of the price of traditional TV.

Sky can evaluate campaigns using an array of behavioural and sentiment matrices – and because it can attribute sales to households exposed to specific ads, Sky can further refine targeting after identifying audiences that performed strongly and those that performed less well.

This allows subsequent campaigns to be fine-tuned, hitting high-performing audiences, cutting waste and boosting return on investment (ROI). In the past year, Sky AdSmart has attracted around 350 new clients, including Asda, Princess Yachts and GoCar in Ireland.

Working with stakeholders

While Sky Media is Bristowe and her team’s stakeholder, they also collaborate with other areas of the company, including Sky Business, which supplies services companies such as pubs and clubs. She and her colleagues consult – the research team at Sky’s programming arm to “compare notes on techniques such as macro trends, eye-tracking to gauge viewing habits, and new ways of using data”. They also represent Sky on the industry side, attending committees for industry bodies such as the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (Barb) and Thinkbox.

“The great thing about Sky is that you’re not prevented from trying out new things,” Bristowe says. “It encourages you to use data in an innovative way, giving help and support around issues such as GDPR.” For instance, the company gives presentations and offers guidance on the General Data Protection Regulation, and how Bristowe and her team can navigate the legislative complexities of EU regulations.

Sky may have earned its reputation operating in traditional linear broadcast, but TV is facing more and more pressure from changing media-consumption habits. Given the explosion of digital and social advertising (see panel, opposite) on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, Sky cannot afford to sit back.

For Bristowe and her research team, this means convention often doesn’t cut it. All the customer data in the world can only tell you so much, and this is why Sky is always on the lookout for new research techniques.

Sky Media works with an array of agencies – some on an ongoing basis, such as Nielsen, BVA-BDRC, Populus, Future Thinking and Differentology, while others are cherry-picked for pieces of work that require a bespoke approach.

“We always look for agencies that can bring something new,” Bristowe says. “We don’t have a strict roster, but have the flexibility to move around and find the best solution, depending on the brief that comes in. We have a healthy mix of research that is for specific brands with a specific objective, as well as some ongoing and behavioural.”

An example of the latter is Sky’s out-of-home viewing tracker, which “has been running for several years now with Ipsos Mori, and gives us a reliable picture of sports events viewing out of home in pubs and in clubs”.

“We have improved the methodology to have overnight sports fixture ratings received the following day,” Bristowe adds. “This tracking study is not only used by Sky Media, but also by Sky Business.”

Sky Media’s work with Boston-based emotional measurement firm Affectiva is another example of a broader research project. The partnership allowed Sky to gauge the emotional reactions of AdSmart viewers using facial coding and emotion analytics software across 1,000 webcams, 20 hours of footage and tens of thousands of data points. It found that AdSmart viewers have a 13% higher emotional response rate than their linear TV counterparts, with engagement levels achieving a 21% higher rate.

Biometric measurement

“We are always on the lookout for new ways to research either behaviour or specific creative. We work closely with our key partner and sponsor of Sky Atlantic, Volvo, to test the fit and appeal of the creative. For this, we have used biometric skin response – it tests the creative appeal we can’t get to using traditional research methods.”

In 2018, Volvo sought to improve brand perceptions beyond those of its competitors with bigger marketing budgets. To gauge emotional reactions to a set of creative idents on the theme of plastic pollution that appeared around Sky Atlantic programmes, Sky and market research agency Future Thinking used biometric research, including facial expression analysis and eye-tracking, to understand emotional response to the campaign. Post-campaign analysis showed that the sponsorship’s impact led to higher consideration levels and purchase intent, up from 44% in 2016 to 73%.

Another example of Sky Media’s data-rich approach to advertising was for supermarket chain Asda, which last year used the platform for a Ramadan range campaign aimed at South Asians. Using AdSmart’s proprietary Geo-Flex technology, which combines and analyses Sky’s customer data with Experian Mosaic data, Sky could reach those consumers with a high propensity to purchase, who lived near a participating store.

The campaign delivered more than 1.5m impressions. Working with research agency BVA-BDRC, Sky conducted online interviews with Sky customers, allowing Asda to assess the campaign’s impact on those the ads reached compared with a control group of consumers who were not targeted.

Retaining values

Today’s advertising marketplace is characterised by innovation and a furious pace of change. It is a marketplace that has also fallen victim to dodgy practices, however – from a lack of transparency in media trading to the sometimes irresponsible use of consumer data and growing concerns around brand safety. So Bristowe is quick to stress that the pace and scale of change should not come at the expense of openness and transparency.

Last year, the research and insights team adopted Sky’s ‘Bigger Picture’ values, which include “being fair and responsible, creative and action-orientated, customer-led and jargon-free, forward-looking, collaborative and inclusive”. The team meets informally every few months to share ideas and discuss how those values can be put into action.

“We really stick to those values and they help to guide us, not in terms of taking ridiculous risks, but by pushing boundaries all the time,” Bristowe says.

Pushing those boundaries and continuing to up the game is a constant challenge for Bristowe and her team, however. “Obviously, we want to measure as accurately as possible. It is expensive, but we’re looking to the long term – looking to collaborate more with other broadcasters and do things together. That’s a challenge because everyone is juggling different priorities within their own organisation.”

Other issues Sky faces include measuring differing blends of platform for different brand campaigns while conforming to industry standards. “We’re working with Barb to ensure that we make things such as Dovetail, which aims to measure total reach of programme and commercial audiences, work well for everybody.

“The challenges bring with them loads of opportunities around data, and around the scope and scale that we’ve got to work with.”

Despite the challenging environment, Bristowe and her team’s work in research and insights appears to be paying dividends. In July 2018, Sky posted UK and Ireland advertising revenues of £540m for the year, up from £508m in the previous year.

This article was first published in Impact.