• by Wayne Friedman , May 1, 2019

NBCUniversal is expanding its CFlight guarantee audience measurement with sister media/broadcaster Sky across all of Sky's content and platforms in the U.K. and Europe.

CFlight is an advertising metric encompassing all live, on-demand and time-shifted commercial impressions on every viewing platform for the entire length of a marketer’s campaign.

NBCU launched it a year ago, before the U.S. TV upfront advertising market. A majority of NBC clients use it, according to sources. Recently, Viacom said it would start a separate, but similar measure also calling it CFlight.

CFlight will kick off for Sky Media -- Sky’s advertising arm -- in the U.K. this fall, expanding its other European territories in 2020. NBC intends to push the CFlight as a global standard of measurement.

This follows an announcement NBCU and Sky made to expand Sky’s advance advertising effort, called AdSmart.

NBCU started CFlight due to expansion in viewing habits across growing time-shifting platforms -- video-on-demand and OTT platforms.

It broadens a TV network measure/guarantee for TV advertisers going beyond the industry standard C3/C7 measure -- the average commercial minutes plus three or seven days of time-shifting. TV commercial rating guarantees in the U.S. started in 2007.

CFlight uses industry's measurement sources -- Nielsen in the U.S., BARB in the UK -- as well as other third-party measurement companies for other platforms, such as for OTT services.