TiVo Market Research

I thought you TiVo owners out there would be interested to know that a couple of weeks ago TiVo and TRA, a media and marketing research company, partnered to offer a service to businesses that fuses together viewing, demographic and purchasing data. As the data is collected, it’s packaged in anonymous statistics, so it is not invading your privacy.

This is not completely new - in 2007 TiVo started sampling 20,000 units with the “Top Commercial Rankings” via the TiVo Stop||WatchTM service. In comparison to the new offering, it was definitely a lighter data pull. To me, this type of action is no biggie, especially since it’s anonymous. For some individuals I know, it could be disturbing. However, from a business point of view, this service is brilliant. With the agreement, TRA will draw anonymous viewing data from TiVo’s base of 1.7 million stand-alone subscribers. With the TRA Media TRAnalytics service, this is the only research with the ability to correlate household purchasing behavior with media exposure to effectively evaluate the ROI (Return on Investment) of a company’s media spending.

David F. Poltrack, chief research officer, CBS Corporation, and president of CBS Vision, says, “As a TiVo Stop||WatchTM and Media TRAnalytics subscriber, the level of actionable, detailed reporting that each provides is extremely valuable in helping us evaluate TV viewing behavior and the efficacy of our advertisers’ campaigns. By combining forces, TiVo and TRA will essentially be offering the ‘single source’ measurement of television viewing and product purchasing behavior that the marketing community has been asking for since the 1970s.”

TRA has been producing anonymous, aggregate reports associating TV viewership with household purchasing data based on cable data since October 2007. The company intends to expand its use of cable television data and harmonize cable and TiVo data to produce the largest and most representative anonymous sampling of the United States’ television audience.

The TRA engine has the ability to analyze viewership data from television digital set boxes (DSTBs) as well as cross-tabulate second-by-second advertising audience data from a significant number of DSTBs with other media touchpoints, household demographics and actual household product purchasing data in the same homes. TRA’s web-based research reports permit advertisers and agencies to reallocate their advertising, shifting money to advertising that produces higher sales per dollar.

David F. Poltrack, chief research officer, CBS Corporation, and president of CBS Vision, says, “As a TiVo Stop||WatchTM and Media TRAnalytics subscriber, the level of actionable, detailed reporting that each provides is extremely valuable in helping us evaluate TV viewing behavior and the efficacy of our advertisers’ campaigns. By combining forces, TiVo and TRA will essentially be offering the ‘single source’ measurement of television viewing and product purchasing behavior that the marketing community has been asking for since the 1970s.”

TRA has been producing anonymous, aggregate reports associating TV viewership with household purchasing data based on cable data since October 2007. The company intends to expand its use of cable television data and harmonize cable and TiVo data to produce the largest and most representative anonymous sampling of the United States’ television audience.

The TRA engine has the ability to analyze viewership data from television digital set boxes (DSTBs) as well as cross-tabulate second-by-second advertising audience data from a significant number of DSTBs with other media touchpoints, household demographics and actual household product purchasing data in the same homes. TRA’s web-based research reports permit advertisers and agencies to reallocate their advertising, shifting money to advertising that produces higher sales per dollar.