TRA Builds 370,000-Household Database; Signs Discovery As Client
Will Match Viewing Habits Against Product Purchases
By Linda Moss -- Multichannel News, 11/9/2008 5:01:00 PM
TRA has established a 370,000-home nationwide database to match second-by-second TV viewing against actual product purchases at the household level, and signed up Discovery Communications as a client, according to company officials.
The single-source database is for use by TRA’s Media TRAnalytics, a service that was introduced in February and lets advertisers, networks and agencies track TV viewing, via set-tops, versus actual product buying by audiences.
To build its database TRA, a media and marketing research company, has overlaid television viewership data from 1.5 million cable and TiVo households nationally, consumer packaged-goods purchase data from more than 55 million households (licensed data via deals with six supermarket chains), and demographic data from more than 100 million households to create its new database, according to the company.
Back in June, TRA and TiVo unveiled a partnership in which TRA will draw anonymous viewing data from TiVo’s subscriber base. TRA is also collecting anonymous data from about 300,000 homes from several cable operators.
“By the end of year, we’ll be close to having 2 million households between TiVo and the various MSO deals that we have,” TRA chairman and CEO Mark Lieberman said.
Lieberman said that for four decades advertisers have used sex and age as the metric to pick TV shows, rather than matching recent purchase behavior against TV program and commercial exposure, which is what Media TRAnalytics does.
“Sex and age have always been a surrogate for purchase data,” Lieberman said.
TRA’s sample includes both live and time-shifted, or DVR-tuning data, which it claims is necessary to establish an accurate representation of TV-viewing behavior. TRA also has the ability to use other forms of anonymous household purchase data—auto, pharmaceutical, consumer electronics, financial services—to make advertising accountable.
In addition to Discovery Communications signing up as a client for Media TRAnalytics, TRA also said it recently became one of only 65 U.S. companies to obtain ISO 27001 certification, the information security management system standard published by the International Organization for Standardization, designed to ensure security controls to protect information assets. TRA is the only media-measurement company in the United States to achieve this standard.
Nielsen also has services aimed at “fusing” data on media consumption and consumer behavior, with Sony Pictures Television a recent client. Nielsen offers a syndicated metric from NielsenConnect that links Nielsen’s consumer Homescan panel, its National People Meter panel and its Online NetView panel to report how buyers of specific products consume TV and Internet content.
