Media Marketing Research company TRA, Inc. has announced an agreement with TiVo to bundle TiVo’s Audience Research Metrics with their own ‘Media TRAnalytics’ offering. TRA already has agreements with three cable MSOs for anonymous set-top data and anonymous data from TiVo will join this pool. They’ve dropped a press release to tout the deal.
Jun 24, 2008 11:36 ET
TiVo Joins With TRA to Provide First of its Kind Audience Research Product
Only Service to combine anonymous viewership, demographics, and purchasing data; moves TRA closer to goal of one million household national sample size
NEW YORK, June 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ:TIVO) , the creator of and a leader in advertising solutions and television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), and TRA, Inc. (http://www.traglobal.com/), developer of the only scalable advertising research system that creates intelligent media data by measuring and reporting true ROI accountability and transparency for advertising spend, today announced an agreement enabling TRA to license and market TiVo® Audience Research Metrics as a bundled offering with TRA’s Media TRAnalytics™.
Through this partnership, TRA will be drawing anonymous viewing data from TiVo’s base of 1.7 million stand-alone subscribers. This will give TRA’s Media TRAnalytics service, the only research service with the ability to correlate household purchasing behavior with media exposure, access to an unprecedented national sample size in order to effectively evaluate ROI of media spend. This agreement will accelerate TRA’s stated goal of having one million households nationwide of anonymous singlesource data (TV viewership associated with household purchase data). The combined data from TRA and TiVo provides the most comprehensive universe of anonymous purchasing data and anonymous viewership data, covering all television signal sources including digital cable, analog cable, satellite, and over-the-air television, in Live and Timeshifted viewing.
TRA has agreements with three MSOs and has been producing anonymous, aggregate reports associating TV viewership with household purchasing data based on cable data since October 2007. TRA 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.
David F. Poltrack, Chief Research Officer, CBS Corporation and President of CBS Vision said, “As a TiVo Stop||Watch™ 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 advertiser’s 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 1970′s.”
“We are at a pivotal time for the advertising community, as new technologies open new research avenues for the industry to get more in-depth insight into who is viewing which programs and then purchasing products based on advertising,” said Mark Lieberman, CEO and Chairman of TRA Inc. “TRA’s agreement with TiVo is exciting for our company as Media TRAnalytics™ becomes the most advanced media and marketing research solution available on the market today.”
“This partnership is the result of a shared vision for the future of advertising research and an ongoing commitment to help the media industry better understand the effectiveness of ad campaigns,” said Todd Juenger, Vice President & General Manager, TiVo Audience Research & Measurement. “TiVo’s expansive audience behavioral data coupled with TRA’s access to the richest amount of purchase statistics with corresponding demographics creates the most powerful, comprehensive research tool for measuring advertising efficacy and ROI of media spend — bar none. By matching this anonymous data, without using small unreliable panels, advertisers are finally able to connect TV viewing patterns to household purchase behavior and achieve meaningful insight in a way that respects consumer privacy.”
TiVo’s Stop||Watch™ ratings service, introduced in February 2007, is offered via an easily sortable database of ratings for nationally run programs and advertisements from cable and broadcast networks, with data going back to September 2006. The data is derived from a daily, aggregate, anonymous, stratified random sample of 20,000 TiVo units — from which the second-by-second “clickstream” of behavior and viewership is collected and assessed. TRA subscribers who are also Stop||Watch™ subscribers will have access to the total breadth and depth of both services.
The partnership was announced during the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement 3.0 conference in New York where Messrs. Juenger and Poltrack are featured speakers.
About TiVo Inc.
Founded in 1997, TiVo (NASDAQ:TIVO) pioneered a brand new category of products with the development of the first commercially available digital video recorder (DVR). Sold through leading consumer electronic retailers and our website, TiVo has developed a brand which resonates boldly with consumers as providing a superior television experience. Through agreements with leading satellite and cable providers, TiVo also integrates its DVR service features into the set-top boxes of mass distributors. TiVo’s DVR functionality and ease of use, with such features as Season Pass™ recordings and WishList® searches and TiVo KidZone, have elevated its popularity among consumers and have created a whole new way for viewers to watch television. With a continued investment in its patented technologies, TiVo is revolutionizing the way consumers watch and access home entertainment. Rapidly becoming the focal point of the digital living room, TiVo’s DVR is at the center of experiencing new forms of content on the TV, such as broadband delivered video, music and photos. With innovative features, such as TiVoToGo™ transfers and online scheduling, TiVo is expanding the notion of consumers experiencing “TiVo, TV your way.®” The TiVo® service is also at the forefront of providing innovative marketing solutions for the television industry, including a unique platform for advertisers and audience research measurement.
TiVo, ‘TiVo, TV your way.’, Season Pass, WishList, TiVoToGo, Stop||Watch, and the TiVo Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of TiVo Inc. or its subsidiaries worldwide. © 2008 TiVo Inc. All rights reserved. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
About TRA, Inc.
TRA, Inc. (True ROI Accountability for Media — http://www.traglobal.com/) is a media marketing research company whose proprietary patent pending technology cost effectively matches the ads that people actually receive with the products people actually buy; giving advertisers, agencies, and media transparency, accountable measurement, and return-on-investment for their advertising spend. TRA’s Media TRAnalytics™ 2.0 provides Advertising/Media Exposure (AME), Return on Investment (ROI), Audience Retention (AR), Reach and Frequency (RF), and True Target Index (TTI) reports. TRA’s 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.
Founded by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Lieberman, an experienced entrepreneur, and advertising industry measurement pioneer Bill Harvey, President and Co-Founder, TRA employs proprietary measurement technologies and proven algorithms developed and refined over a 10-year period. TRA’s founders have been in the media research industry for more than 25 years and have built and run digital media companies in the marketing research, video-on-demand, Internet video and information publishing industries.
In August of 2007, TRA closed its first institutional financing round led by Kodiak Ventures, WPP/Kantar Media Research and unnamed angels. MediaVest, a subsidiary of Paris-based Publicis Groupe, is TRA’s first agency to be using Media TRAnalytics 2.0. TRA’s Board includes John Billock, the former Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer of Time Warner Cable, Burt Manning, the former Chief Executive Officer of J. Walter Thompson, Bruce Barnet, the former CEO of Reed Business Information, Chip Meakem, general partner from Kodiak Ventures, and Bill McKenna, the President of KMR, North America.
Source: TiVo Inc.
CONTACT: Whit Clay of Sloane & Company, +1-212-446-1864,
wclay@sloanepr.com, for TiVo Inc.; or Andy Dear of Pan Communications,
+1-978-474-1900, tra@pancomm.com, for TRA, Inc.
