• The Wall Street Journal, Monday, February 11, 2008 12:15 PM

A new media research company, TRA (for "True ROI Accountability for Media") is merging data from people's cable set-top boxes with consumer-purchase databases to give marketers a clearer picture of who is watching shows such as "Grey's Anatomy" and what those viewers might buy.

As the Web's ability to target specific consumers races ahead, TV advertisers have been under increasing pressure to demonstrate that their money is well-spent. Efforts to get more detailed data have been stymied because of the cost of developing panels and paying households to participate.

TRA is using data from cable boxes to measure second-by-second viewership of TV programs and commercials in 300,000 households in Southern California. It expects to have more than one million households across the country by the end of this year. Working with seven grocery-store chains, it will match that cable information with data from more than 12-million households' grocery-store purchases based on frequent-shopper-card data. TRA says it doesn't see the identities of the people in the household.

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