(25 June 2009 11:25 pm)

MUMBAI: US-based Tivo and Quantcast have partnered to provide advertisers and media companies with cross-platform audience analysis solutions available for evaluating the correlation between television viewership and online activity.

While Tivo is known to create television services and ad solutions for digital video recorders (DVRs), Quantcast is a web-based audience insights service focused on enabling addressable advertising.

The announcement was made during the Advertising Research Foundation's Audience Measurement 4.0 conference in New York, which concluded Wednesday.

The primary differentiator of the new cross-platform solution is the size of the available Tivo/Quantcast sample - 35,000 households total. A combination of data from TiVo's Power Watch ratings panel and Quantcast's direct measurement offering will allow better evaluation of advertising effectiveness, cross platform media consumption, and programming affinity by producing TV and online media consumption and activity reports, the company said in a release.

Tivo's Power Watch ratings service delivers second-by-second programme and commercial ratings data with demographic segmentations for 35,000 Tivo households which have volunteered to take part in a 'passive' consumer panel. Already, Quantcast solutions are widely adopted in the marketplace to interpret audiences for over 10 million web destinations and enable media companies and marketers to directly measure activity across brand websites and online advertising campaigns.

By creating an anonymously joined sample, Tivo and Quantcast will revolutionise cross-platform audience analysis by providing marketers with the ability control and self-define the actions against which to evaluate media consumption and a sample large enough to deliver actionable insights.

Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman says, "The current advertising marketplace, with most of its spend in broadcast, is unable to accurately attribute effectiveness and customer affinity across channels."

For Advertisers there will be an overlap analysis - combined versus independent reach/frequency of television and Internet advertising Downstream Behaviour. How does television and web ad exposure influence downstream Internet behaviour.

For Media Companies there will be an overlap analysis on consumption of video content, TV-only versus, web-only versus combined Downstream Behaviour. How does television viewing influence/predict Internet video viewing behaviour and vice-versa.