• by Karlene Lukovitz , January 31, 2020

This week brought more important developments on the advanced TV audience targeting and analytics fronts — including an OTT/linear data partnership announcement from everyone’s favorite frenemy, Amazon.

But let’s start with the news of MRI-Simmons’ new deal with Fourthwall Media.

This partnership between the media planning world’s dominant source of consumer media, lifestyle and product usage data, and a TV set-top data analytics firm fueled by what it says is the “largest independent source of second-by-second cable TV viewing data” should enable new levels of sophistication in audience profiles for linear, as well as advanced, TV.

The companies describe their method as a “household matching tool” that will enable advertisers and agencies to create MRI-Simmons audience segments for targeted TV campaigns down to the TV household level. MRI-Simmons offers consumer insights across more than 500 product categories and 8,000 individual brands.

In a comment in MediaPost, Media Dynamics’ Ed Papazian — a  veteran media planning/buying strategist turned consultant not known for gushing — called the partnership a “very good move.”

“I've been pointing out for years,” he wrote, “that MRI and/or Simmons data can provide advertisers not only with indices of product and individual brand usage for hundreds of TV shows, cable channels, magazines, radio formats websites, etc., but added to this, they can define the mindset of these audiences… in ways that are not available at scale by simply tracking visits to websites.”

The tool might, for example, be used to identify that audience members are price-conscious, eco-conscious, concerned about specific health issues, or into fashion or certain kinds of breakfast foods, he noted.

Asked by Advanced TV Insider to elaborate a bit about what differentiates this offering, the partner companies stressed the advanced psychographic measurements based on MRI-Simmons’ 60 years’ worth of attitudinal and behavioral data points, gathered through ongoing surveys and passive measurement.

In addition, they pointed out that one of the two data sets being supplied by Simmons-MRI, MRI’s annual Survey of the American Consumer, is the largest survey of its kind (24,000 Americans), the only one conducted in person (in homes) and the industry’s only MRC-accredited multi-media service.

Combining those nationally representative psychographic insights with FourthWall’s Reveal data and analytics platform “is something marketers haven’t had access to, until now,” says Ellen Dudar, chief product officer at FourthWall.

(FourthWall’s own ability to create custom segments and index them against networks, programs, dayparts, and other household characteristics has “routinely created 10% efficiencies in TV spending, while delivering better campaign performance when compared to traditional, age-gender planning,” she says.)

The new self-serve analytics platform combines census-level TV viewing data with household characteristics (all data is anonymized) to generate MRI-Simmons segments for use in audience exploration and optimized media planning.

For instance, a marketer could index the households in an MRI-Simmons audience segment across dayparts, programs, networks and local stations, “within minutes,” Dudar says.

“This partnership allows us to pre-match our households and make them available within the Reveal interface so that we don’t have to do a first-party match with each brand using the product,” she explains.

“As an example, we might tie together MRI-Simmons’ brand affinity research, along with demographic characteristics and consumer attitudes and interests, to create an audience of young middle-class families interested in buying new furniture that only believe in buying American, and then determine where to reach them on TV, how to most effectively plan that campaign, and then measure the impact of the campaign among the same target audience.”

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and global TV data and audience analytics company Samba TV have partnered to make Samba’s TV data available within the new AWS Data Exchange, designed to give AWS users a secure way to  find, subscribe to and use third-party data in the cloud.

AWS users can now access Samba’s linear and OTT viewership insights and ad exposure data, aggregated at a DMA level, through the cloud-based exchange.

The aggregated data—derived from more than 20 million TV households that have opted in to share viewing activity, directly into applications, analysis and machine-learning models built on AWS—can be used to build advanced analytics, services, and tools.

“This will bring Samba TV’s dataset to new verticals, creating new opportunities to see our insights in action,” says Samba senior vice president Aden Zaman.

“TV viewership behavior is changing rapidly, and businesses across all verticals need to better grasp how these changing behaviors are affecting their target markets,” adds Chris Casey, general manager, BD, for AWS Data Exchange.

Yup, that about sums it up.