In what is being hailed as the the first research of its kind, the CIMM (Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement) today will  release findings of a so-called “single-source” study utilizing “passive” measurement technologies to understand how advertising influences consumers across different screens. The study, is single-source, because it measures exposure of different media among the same respondents. It’s passive, because the technology utilizes a mobile app that detects a user’s exposure to audio signals of TV, PC, tablet and smarphones, enabling researchers to measure what content and ads they had an opportunity to see without the bias of self-reporting methods.

 

While the most significant finding of the pilot study, which was conducted by Symphony Advanced Media for CIMM, is methodological -- that it works and is a potentially scalable way to unobtrusively measure how consumers are exposed to ads and how that influences their behavior -- there are some early findings indicating that there are compounding and complementary effects across media, particularly TV and handheld devices.

 

“We got some interesting insights about what the percentage of time was that people were actually in the ad pod -- and exposed to an ad -- that they were also using their mobile device,” says Mike Saxon, senior vice president at SAM, who will be presenting the findings at a CIMM symposium in New York this afternoon. “It was between 20% and 30% of the time. It’s too early to say if that’s good or bad, but it opens up a line of research and the role of multi-screen viewing on advertising exposure.”

 

“It does identify a methodology for getting there,” adds Jane Clarke, managing director of CIMM, who will also be presiding over today’s symposium, which will present other important developments in innovative forms of media audience measurement.

 

The significant thing about the SAM research, she says, is that it is the first to passively measure exposure to ads across multiple screens, and then to correlate them to research on the effects on a brand. While the brand effects research isn’t passive (it’s based on recall studies), the media measurement part at least takes away any respondent biases and compares the exposure of the ads equally across all screens.