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.
Â
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.â€
Â
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.
Â
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%.
Â
“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.