TRA signs TiVo for timeshifting data tie-up

US-- TRA has signed an agreement with digital video recorder company TiVo to use live and time-shifted viewing data from TiVo subscribers to gauge advertising ROI.

The deal, announced at the Advertising Research Foundation's (ARF) audience measurement conference in New York on Tuesday (24 June), represents a major expansion for TRA's Media TRAnalytics service, which combines purchase information from sources including shopper loyalty cards with TV viewing data.

The firm now has access to 1.7 million users of TiVo's standalone DVRs. Currently it has more than 300,000 homes in its TV panel, of which around 50,000 are also providing purchase data. It aims to increase the panel size to one million by the end of the year.

TiVo set up its own research and measurement arm in 2006 and last year introduced a new service combining ratings with demographic data. Todd Juenger, who heads the research division, told Research that single-source measurement addresses long-standing limitations in traditional media and consumer research. “We measured how many people saw an ad because that was all we knew how to measure,” he said. “What we really wanted to know was did that lead to a purchase or not.”

Bart Flaherty of GroupM Business Sciences welcomed the news, which he said could provide an equivalent to the typical ‘bump chart' that sales staff can use to demonstrate the impact of pricing activity. “One of the hopes for these massively scaled single source data sets is that we'll be able to have something along the lines of a bump chart for marketing – something that we can look at and start seeing some of these direct effects,” he said. “That's going to give us a much stronger argument.”

Dave Poltrack, chief research officer of existing TiVo research client CBS, said the two firms “will essentially be offering the single-source measurement of television viewing and product purchasing behaviour that the marketing community has been asking for since the 1970s”.

Arbitron and Nielsen's attempt to provide such a single-source data service was abandoned earlier this year.

When asked if CBS would offer advertisers guarantees of sales increases, Poltrack said: “Three years down the road I'm more confident that we'll be making business deals based on this kind of data than we would be on traditional audience measurement.”

Author: Robert Bain