• by Wayne Friedman , August 2, 2007

Two Nielsen Company divisions--Nielsen Media Research and Claritas--will bring two of their biggest respective research tools together for advertisers.

Nielsen Media Research's Npower and Claritas' Prizm NE will merge, among other things, TV ratings analysis with targeted audience groups, sometimes known as "psychographics."

Beyond just broad reaching demographic age groups, Prizm segments some 66-audience categories into lifestyle and economic factors, with unusual descriptors--"Blue Blood Estates" to "Young Digerati" to "Bohemian Mix," for example.

With Nielsen's Npower, marketers can draw data such as minute-by-minute ratings, reach and frequency, co-viewing, length of tuning per viewer, audience duplication, heavy and light viewer, median age and median income.

Prizm has been around since the 1970s, when company founder Jonathan Robbin used U.S. census data to segment populations by ZIP codes into lifestyle and socio-economic data, such as income and occupation.

For example, Young Digerati is classified as "the nation's tech-savvy singles and couples living in fashionable neighborhoods on the urban fringe." Blue Blood Estates is "the nation's second-wealthiest group, characterized by the six-figure incomes earned by business executives, managers and professionals.

Brad Adgate, senior vice president and corporate research director of Horizon Media, says marketers have been able to combine these research software tools for some time.

"Now, it makes the data more readily available," he says. "It'll help people who want another layer of geo-segmentation, giving them [more] intelligence on audience delivery."

But Adgate warns this segmentation--based on ZIP codes--may not be enough in future years: "It won't be as granular [data] from digital set-top boxes."