What Are Data Companies Contributing to the Television Market? Overview Part 2 - Data Integration

In our continuing series comparing all of the data company offerings to facilitate and expand television measurement, I have asked a range of data company executives the same set of six questions. Last week, these executives described their company's data offerings that are in use in the television sector and whether they own their own data and/or aggregate datasets.  This week they describe their company’s data initiatives in greater detail.

My take is that while there are many creative approaches to television and cross platform measurement, there are still many divergent solutions that purport to measure the same thing. It is my hope that eventually all of these competing entities begin to collaborate and discover that some of these solutions can be merged to result in an even more powerful (and standardize-able)  measurement capability.

Question 2: Does your company have an overall data initiative to market and integrate your data into television analytics? If so what is it?

Charles Buchwalter, President and CEO Symphony Advanced Media: The best approach we have found is to start with the client’s own data direct matched onto the SymphonyAM panel. This enhances all the data on that seed sample, and allows extrapolation from the seed sample by fusion onto however many tens of millions of homes apply. The data analytics can then be done in parallel on the direct match small sample and the fusion match scaled-up big data sample to ensure the agreement directionally on all items that could affect the decisions made. A further quality assurance methodology employed is to use fusion on the maximum number of mutually measured variables.

Eric Schmitt, Executive Vice President, Communications, TV and Media. Allant: Allant has been focused on the integration of data into TV analytics for nearly 10 years. For premium video ad sellers (including distributors and network programmers), Allant’s Audience Interconnect® software platform matches cable, satellite and telco (collectively, MVPD) subscribers to other datasets to enable precise, audience based media recommendations across linear, VOD and online.  For ad buyers and agencies, Allant’s Advanced Audience Insight platform uses data from multiple sources to build custom audience segments.  Together, these tools and data provide common ground for audience segment definitions and measurement of true cross-platform campaign reach/frequency into target segments.

Cathy Hetzel, Rentrak Corporate President: RubikTM, Rentrak’s recently introduced television analytics platform, helps match TV viewing patterns with product usage in order to target audiences more effectively. Rubik taps into Rentrak's Advanced Demographics, which combine TV viewing with information about the products consumers buy and the cars they drive. The tool lets networks, agencies, and advertisers identify the most relevant target households, and combine multiple segments into a campaign target so that custom reach and frequency reports can be defined and calculated. Rentrak currently provides proprietary database management and analytical report solutions for many of our customers of relevant value and interest. We do the following:

­              Measure and maintain addressable campaigns for multiple MVPDs

­              Deliver cross-platform reporting for clients that deliver digital feeds

­              Deliver advanced reach and frequency analysis for agency partners

­              Unique custom first and third party data segmentation for specific advertiser clients

­              ROI exposure conversion metrics

Leslie Wood, Nielsen Catalina Solutions: All of our business is about integrating data for analytics and so a large piece is television. We have two key products. One is targeting and the other is measurement. They are all wrapped in something called Advantics which allows users to look at television programs or genres or dayparts or aggregates of programs to see how well they perform in terms of any behavioral characteristics that we have. Advantics can do both the pre-plan and the post buy. So you can estimate the future and you can look back, giving you all the data you need to the media planning, targeting, buying side. The other side of the business is doing measurement, looking at the effect of advertising on sales. We look at this as a cycle where you can enter at any time – you measure what the effect is of my advertising, you can look at all of the different pieces of your target and how advertising influenced them, you can pick a new target or modify your existing target, you can define that target, you can then buy off this data. Each time in the cycle you can improve the quality of your television buy and understand which parts of the audience respond and what they are responding to.

Joan FitzGerald Senior Vice President, Television and Cross Media Service, comScore: Measuring television and digital platforms in combination is crucially important to publishers, media brands, advertisers and advertising agencies.  In addition, radio and other media are important to expand the footprint for publishers.  comScore provides independent measurement and analytics so that clients can understand the total consumption of their content – regardless of platform – video and non-video – and quantify unduplicated reach across platforms.  Our solutions enable advertisers and their agencies to create cross-media packages combining elements from TV and digital to analyze unduplicated, incremental and overlapped audience reach and engagement across platforms. In addition, comScore has developed multi-touch attribution methodologies to measure the impact of television, digital and combined TV/digital advertising on brand sales and brand attitudes.  

Mainak Mazumdar Chief Science Officer,Simulmedia: All of our data is already integrated into our VAMOS platform and is used not only for planning future campaigns, but also for post-campaign reporting and analytics. 

Bill Feininger, President FourthWall Media: Yes.  We provide the base level information that our clients integrate into their products and services.  These services include television and cross platform measurement, ad placement (television and digital), programmatic services and a variety of new analytics services.

Kelly Abcarian, Senior Vice President, Watch Product Architecture, Nielsen: Nielsen’s data is the basis for the vast majority of television analyses that are conducted in the United States.  In our national TV panel, we collect viewership behavior and a broad array of household characteristics from over 26,000 representative households, expanding to 40,000 representative households by next year.  At that point, Nielsen’s TV dataset will be driven by metered viewership from over 100,000 people.  In about half of these homes, we also collect digital data including computers and multimedia TV devices, and tablets and smartphones by next year.  This data enables advertisers and agencies to identify the audiences they are looking for, and media owners to demonstrate the value their audiences offer to advertisers. Our clients leverage these broader insights and characteristics to help them monetize and transact upon their content. Nielsen’s data also helps our advertiser clients plan their marketing mix to reach the most valuable consumers, and then determine whether those consumers were exposed to the ads (Reach), whether the ads impacted their attitudes (Resonance) and whether they drove sales (Reaction).  This “3R” framework also helps media companies develop better content, allocate and optimize their inventory, and ultimately, drive revenue.  The 3R framework is our basic equation for advertising effectiveness: the more of your ideal audience you can reach, and the more intensely your advertising resonates with them, the stronger your sales lift – or reaction.

Frank Foster, SVP General Manager, TiVo Research and Analytics (TRA): Data needs context to be useful, so integrating our data into the TV analytics ecosystem is a priority. To that end, we work with DMPs to integrate our viewership/purchase segments into their solutions, making TiVo Research data available across multiple verticals. Our data can easily be imported into third party optimizers and allocation systems, so it can be used to directly inform media buys. Conversely, we aim to make TV data available to digital advertisers. We integrate data from Datalogix, comScore, LiveRamp, NinthDecimal, and others into our Media TRAnalytics platform so our clients can understand the impact TV and digital have together.  Our analysis is also increasingly used post-flight to give an unbiased evaluation of TV exposure. Since we have a 100% direct Household match, we can tell exactly which homes were exposed, rather than having to fuse or model a limited sample.