Consumer goods data powerhouse IRI is enhancing the information it gathers on the food and household items people buy with TV and digital data. The idea is to layer on the IRI scores which represent propensity to buy certain types of product to television programming data from Rentrak and digital audience data from Comscore.
IRI harvests data directly through a panel of 80,000 active consumers, tagging them with scores by product. Now that information is matched by household to Rentrak and Comscore data. Rentrak tracks video-on-demand viewing on 120 million televisions in 210 markets. Digital audience measurement company Comscore gathers information on 1.5 trillion global digital interactions each month.
Rentrak has worked with IRI for a couple years, but the TV data firm's CEO and Vice Chairman Bill Livek calls this "a massive expansion of a really good working relationship."
The companies expect the integrated data to inform media planning in addition to campaign measurement because it replaces the traditional approach of targeting age and gender groups on TV with targeting audiences based on actual likelihood to buy certain items.
Likely to buy
"I can actually design my media plan around purchase propensity of the segments watching each and every show," said Andrew Appel, IRI president and CEO. "We think that next generation 'pro-scoring' will not only be propensity to purchase, but propensity to interact with media," he said.
The addition of the Comscore data could help determine whether sales were affected by what people watched online.
In the future IRI aims to continually optimize its scoring models with an array of data points. For instance, a model's algorithm might be adjusted based on the fact that purchases were made following exposure to a certain number of brand impressions on Pinterest.
The company also said it is on track to process data on shopper transactions daily rather than weekly, which is its current practice. Daily updates could more readily reveal the effects of weather on purchasing, for example, or show the impact of digital advertising on CPG transactions.
"You don't have to wait two or three weeks to see the results of a digital campaign," said Mr. Appel.
All three firms will make the combined data available to clients.
