• by Joe Mandese , June 23, 2008

In a move that has the potential to shift the way advertisers buy television and online advertising ads, the Nielsen Co. today will unveil the latest in an ongoing series of so-called "fusion" research products that integrate data from disparate media and brand research. The latest product, which was created for Sony Pictures Television, fuses audience ratings data from Nielsen's TV and online surveys with the product purchasing data from Nielsen's HomeScan panel to create a unified view of what TV programs and Web properties consumers use and what brands they buy.

The fusion, the latest of what is expected to be an ongoing series, was developed by NielsenConnect, the unit of Nielsen headed by former Madison Avenue media chief Jon Mandel. While such fusions, which use sophisticated math to create pseudo equivalents of expensive single-source samples are still controversial in some research circles, they increasingly are looked upon as a pragmatic solution to the high costs associated with trying to get consumers to participate in complicated and expensive single-source research studies such as Project Apollo, which Nielsen and Arbitron recently shut down.

In the case of the new Nielsen fusion, all of the HomeScan panelists were surveyed on their media usage behavior to give Nielsen a base for matching their product purchasing data with media usage data from Nielsen's TV and online surveys. The HomeScan panelists were asked about their use of broadband vs. narrowband Internet connections, whether they were DVR households, how may hours of TV they watched each week, and other things that would enable Nielsen's researchers to marry their media and product purchasing data.

The fusion found that Sony's TV and online properties reach households accounting for $346 billion in annual spending for consumer packaged goods brands, a total that represents about 83.2% of the entire market. The average household reached by Sony's TV or Internet properties at least once a month, spent $3.7000 on consumer packaged goods per year, which is 7% higher than households not reached by Sony's properties.

"We think it's something that an advertiser could use in terms of how they're planning across media, or how they're executing within media," says Howard Shimmel, senior vice president-client insights at Nielsen Co. "I think guarantees are going to continue to be based on age/sex demographics, but this is going to be another factor that a campaign is optimized against. It will help advertisers and it will help media companies understand who their consumers are."

Nielsen already is in talks about extending the fusion concept to other media, including working with some media research companies that are the "currency" for audience estimates among media that Nielsen does not currently measure, including magazines. Nielsen already is well into talks with Mediamark Research Inc., which is the de facto currency of magazine advertising buys, about fusing its database with Nieslen's HomeScan data.

"The magazines would love to have this data to compete against TV and online," Shimmel noted.