TiVo Serves Up Portrait of the Ad-Zappers

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TIVO SERVES UP PORTRAIT OF AD-ZAPPERS
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Suzanne Vranica suzanne.vranica@wsj.com]
Facing increased competition from cable operators and phone companies that offer digital video-recording services, TiVo is making a bigger grab at a different source of revenue: the pile of money that marketers are throwing at companies that promise fresh insights into TV-viewing habits. TiVo, a provider of digital video recorders, about a year ago began selling advertisers second-by-second ratings of programs and commercials based on the viewing habits of its subscribers. Today, the company plans to announce that it will soon add demographic data about the viewers themselves, such as age, income, marital status and ethnicity. Over the past year advertisers have begun getting a clearer picture of how many people are using DVRs when they watch TV and what percentage of them are skipping the ads. But marketers are anxious for detailed portraits of the ad-zappers themselves, so they can tweak their ad strategies accordingly. TiVo's latest offering, dubbed "PowerWatch," brings it more in line with ratings giant Nielsen Media Research, which provides both commercial-ratings data and demographic information. While media buyers are still in the early days of analyzing the Nielsen data, they are beginning to glean more about the ad skippers.
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