• by David L. Smith , June 24, 2008

If you are not a reader of Erwin Ephron's Ephron On Media ,  you should be. Ephron is credited with having "invented" media planning. Where that is true or not (probably is), Ephron has certainly been around since the start of media planning in the '60s. And he remains one of the lucid voices in the media opinion world.

In his most recent piece, he talks about the new Nielsen fusion initiative which marries the NTI TV ratings service with measures on streaming video and consumer purchase behavior. He explains in greater detail than I will go into here, fusion is a function of matching respondents from multiple databases on key characteristics. As he argues, it generally produces better information for decision making than the data sets by themselves.

A few months back I interviewed Jon Mandel who heads up Nielsen Connects, the branch of Nielsen in charge of integrating all of the different sets of data owned by Nielsen. He justifiably argues that Nielsen "knows more about consumer behavior than anybody else." They certainly have a tremendous amount of data on the consumer (although MRI argues that it has the single largest consumer database).

The product Ephron talks about in his recent column appears to be Nielsen Connections. This marries the TV and video data with the database that Mandel calls the largest product sales measurement database in the world. The result is more analytical than ratings, according to  Mandel ,and it will bring the type of tracking and optimization we get from digital into the analogue world. A noble task if they can accomplish it. They've been working on this for over a year and the promise is great.

We've talked in previous columns about Multiple Attribution Protocol.  Mandel contends that this product can result in MAP for cross media. If so, we'll be closer than ever to identifying the individual media elements which contribute to the overall success of a campaign.

Plans include a syndicated product as well as a customized and personalized capability for Nielsen customers based on their needs.

We'll keep you informed of progress in this space. Stay tuned, as the man says.