This whitepaper is a logical extension of CIMM’s prior “Roadmap for Set-Top Box Data” study that focused on the state of STB data as it is currently being used to support a wide range of applications from marketing and carriage negotiations, granular analyses of programming and advertising, to enabling various types of geographic and household level addressable advertising, and granular local and national media planning. For virtually all of these STB applications, various external databases are integrated, resulting in the creation of composite datasets that support various STB related products and services. These databases – linking viewership, demographics, and product/purchase information – are both compliant with consumer privacy laws and guidelines and meet the data integrity and accuracy requirements of users of these advanced and addressable advertising products and services.
As such, this study focused on the various categories and types of external databases that are currently being used with STB data to support advanced and addressable advertising applications. The emphasis of this study is on providing an understanding of the nature of the various databases that either are currently being used, or can be used, to support STB related applications. The advantages and limitations of these databases will be discussed, as well as the processes and procedures that are employed to assure their accuracy and representativeness – especially for media planning applications, where uniformity and conformity with existing measurement metrics are critical.
Focus will also be given to the matching procedures used to combine STB data with other databases to assure both accuracy and compliance with consumer privacy regulations and guidelines.
Ultimately, it is hoped that the information provided in the study will both educate and enlighten STB users on the strengths and limitations of using granular STB data with equally granular external data to augment and enhance target audience definition, media planning, addressable advertising deployment, and campaign measurement.
