• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 25, 2010

Bruce Goerlich, the former Madison Avenue media research honcho who is now head of research at Rentrak brought the elephant into the room during the Q&A portion of the “Online/Offline” panel at OMMA Behavioral this morning.

 

Goerlich, who is focusing a lot of his time at Rentrak on integrating its digital set-top TV usage data with other databases, asked the panel if they were considering tying directly in other data sources, “such as set-top boxes.”

 

Interestingly, Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Experian’s Hitwise unit, said he’s already been involved in doing just that, and that it has yielded some surprisingly impressive results.

 

He said Hitwise worked with an unnamed cable company to identify individual subscribers to develop a “propensity score.” When utilizing that propensity score, and serving ads to those subscribers online, Tancer said the conversion rate increased 56%.

 

“We’re looking not just at online, but television, as well as mobile. The application for this sort of thing really crosses a lot of different platforms,” Tancer said.