What People Watch

Barb provides audience insight that goes beyond traditional trading demographics, giving programmers, planners and buyers richer insight into the attitudes and lifestyle behaviours of viewers.

Two of the additional classifications that Barb clients can use to analyse viewing include:

• Barb’s Additional Panel Classifications (APCs) – whenever a household joins the Barb panel, and every two years after they have joined, everyone aged 16+ in the home complete a Lifestyle Insights questionnaire. This includes questions on their lifestyle and attitudes.
• IPA TouchPoints – Barb data are integrated with IPA TouchPoints, meaning all of Barb’s daily audience data can be analysed by IPA TouchPoints classifications for people aged 16+.

Barb’s APCs
Firstly, let’s look at how we could use the APCs. The below chart looks at the travel destinations that adult viewers of the largest soaps (Jan-May 2023, 1800-2100) plan to visit in the next twelve months.

Chart 1: Travel destinations for soap viewers
Source: Barb, As Broadcast, TV and/or Online Network, Jan-May 2023. Note: Some viewers may intend more than one break across the next twelve months, so the total for each destination will be more than 100%.

A beach or coastal destination is the most popular option for viewers of all the four soaps, particularly for EastEnders viewers. Meanwhile, Hollyoaks viewers are more likely to be planning a camping/glamping (17%) or caravanning (17%) break than other soap viewers. Could we infer they are younger, have less disposable income or perhaps they are just more frugal?

IPA TouchPoints
In Chart 2 below, we have looked at one of the IPA TouchPoints classifications, heavy music streamers, and compared the genres they like to watch with those for all adults 16+ across Jan-May.

Chart 2: Genre viewing by IPA TouchPoints’ heavy music streamers, indexed vs adults 16+
Source: Barb, As Broadcast, TV and/or Online Network, Jan-May 2023

We can see that heavy music streamers are much more likely to watch sport than the average adult, and have less interest in news, hobbies and leisure programming and documentaries.

Within IPA TouchPoints survey, there are also non-standard demographics, for example we can look at personality types such as extroverts or those that deem themselves conscientious. Another way to look at the data is through the lens of generations.

The most recognised of the generation monikers is probably Generation X, first coined in the 1950s by the Hungarian photographer Robert Capa. The musician Billy Idol also named his band after the phrase/label, but it was with Douglas Coupland and his book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture that the phrase became a synonymous description of a generation.

The chart below looks at the average daily viewing time of total identified viewing across the defined generations.

Chart 3: IPA TouchPoints generations’ daily hours of total identified viewing
Source: Barb, As Broadcast, TV and/or Online Network, Jan-May 2023

As you might expect, we can see that the highest number of hours of viewing is by the older generations, the natural assumption being that many will have fewer work obligations and more free time for viewing. At the other end of the scale, Millennials view under three hours per day, and Generation Z view the least amount at under two hours per day, presumably due to having to fit in viewing around work, study and other family or social commitments.

We can then drill down further into these generations’ viewing by total broadcaster, total SVOD/AVOD and total video-sharing hours.

Table 1: Highest level of total broadcaster, total SVOD/AVOD and total video-sharing viewing by IPA TouchPoints generations
Source: Barb, As Broadcast, Jan-May 2023 * TV Set Viewing

The tables above show the generations in terms of average daily viewing time of broadcaster, SVOD/AVOD and video-sharing content. As we see every month in our Total Identified Viewing summary chart, total broadcaster viewing attracts the highest levels of daily viewing. It is topped by the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers. Meanwhile, the highest levels of SVOD/AVOD and video-sharing viewing are topped by Millennials, with Generation Z not far behind.

Each of these methods gives us the option of looking at Barb viewing data through a different lens to give us richer insight and depth into people’s behaviour by delving into their lifestyles, attitudes and viewing behaviours.