• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, May 10, 2010

This week brought a new partnership for audience research between TiVo, the pioneering digital video recorder company, and Millward Brown, which specializes in brand research. The strategic pairing will combine custom consumer segmentation investigations from Millward Brown with TiVo's audience viewing information to produce brand-specific TV audience data.

Specifically, Millward Brown's clients will be able to ask proprietary questions to panelists drawn from among 35,000 TiVo subscribers who have opted in to participate in TiVo's PowerWatch ratings service. It covers all nationally distributed programs and commercials across broadcast, digital cable, analog cable, satellite, and telecom TV, in both live and time-shifted viewing.

After selecting and sorting panelists into discrete segments on the basis of their product and brand preferences and various other characteristics, advertisers and media planners can observe the aggregate viewing behavior of each segment.

According to the companies, this data should allow brand advertisers to determine which programs and networks their target consumer segments watch more often than the average TV viewer.

This data, in turn, will enable advertisers to allocate TV ad dollars more efficiently by concentrating on programs that over-index in terms of viewership by their target market.

Bill Pink, Millward Brown's senior vice president of marketing science, stated that the new service will "provide a full 360-degree view of all television consumption, for programs and specific commercials, passively observed, for each segment." He added: "This allows us to add a previously unforeseen level of actionability to our recommendations for targeting."