• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 5, 2011

SAY Media has unveiled a platform that identifies individuals on the company's network who have stopped regularly consuming live television and then targets ads to them online. Working with Quantcast, the offering pulls together online and offline data to give advertisers insight into behavioral changes for video and television consumption.

SAY Media recently began testing the platform with one unnamed brand. The companies will monitor the target audience for behavioral changes. The platform targets through traditional Web browsing rather than mobile devices, but that will change as the technology develops.

In its development of the offering, Quantcast ran a statistical model against profiles that SAY Media developed that identify consumers who are "highly likely to be off the grid" -- meaning those who have curtailed watching live television content.

It examines the Web behavior of those people and identifies differences, explains Matt Rosenberg, vice president of solutions at SAY Media. "Quantcast delivers the target ad through our ad server," he said. "They have targeting data on the vast majority of U.S. consumers."

SAY Media released a study in November with comScore and IPG Media Lab that finds one-third of the online adult population -- approximately 56 million people -- had either stopped watching television live or watched most of their video programming on a platform other than live television.

The other study  released in September -- commissioned with political media consultancies Targeted Victory and Chong & Koster and implemented by Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies and Thomas Eldon of SEA Polling -- confirmed that one-third of the audience had not watched live television in the previous week. About 88% of the audience who watching programming through a digital video recorder skipped at least three-fourths of the ads.

The technology points to implications on how advertisers will communicate with brands across channels, from Web to mobile to television.