Nielsen has launched a cross-platform advertising product using technology from ad-analytics startup MediaMath designed to correlate how people watch TV with what they do online, in order to better target Web ad campaigns to consumers.
The Nielsen Online Audience Segments - TV Viewing service is currently being used by clients including Microsoft, Adap.TV, Specific Media, Undertone and Videology to optimize advertising placements for marketers, according to Nielsen.
Nielsen uses MediaMath's platform to analyze TV-Internet patterns by overlaying TV viewing behavior from the Nielsen national television sample with its 210,000-member online panel. Those are extrapolated to the U.S. online population in general, to let enhance audience segmentation for online advertising campaigns.
New York-based MediaMath, founded 2007, is majority-owned by its employees with funding from Safeguard Scientifics, QED Investors, Observatory Capital and Catalyst Partners.
"This is a tremendous next step in connecting the dots between offline and online behavior," Nielsen general manager of digital Jonathan Carson said in a statement. "The fact that we're using the very same data that's deployed within the traditional TV economy is a key differentiator which resonates with the industry."
The service builds segments based on types of TV viewership, including shows or channels most viewed, heavy or light viewers, genres and viewer attributes. Based on those profiles, Nielsen is able to model a group of consumers ideal for a specific campaign or message, according to the company.
Other Nielsen online-advertising ecosystem initiatives include the launch of the Nielsen Innovation Lab, designed to develop new ways of measuring ad effectiveness across platforms. Separately, last month Nielsen acquired privately held 60-employee startup Vizu and said it would incorporate Vizu's technology for measuring real-time online ad effectiveness into its cross-platform campaign measurement service.
Nielsen Online Audience Segments can be accessed in multiple ways, including via an application programming interface, a direct-match system or by server-to-server matching with Nielsen's data management platform powered by eXelate, the company said.
