NEWS
RELEASE
Thursday 28th
October 2010 – for immediate use
RSMB launches
dedicated media data fusion business
Specialist
audience measurement company RSMB is to increase its commitment to data fusion
and other forms of data integration in the media sector. The company is recruiting a Head of Business
Development who will work with RSMB’s statistical and IT specialists to enhance
and promote the company’s expertise to both new and existing clients. RSMB will also be recruiting additional technical
staff to support the growth of this business.
RSMB
is currently undertaking major data integration projects for both the IPA and
the National Readership Survey (NRS).
For the IPA the company is completing work on the ChannelPlanner for
TouchPoints 3. This allows media owners
and agencies to plan cross-media schedules for a range of media – including for
the first time on-line audiences based on UKOM data. RSMB has also undertaken a similar project for
the Danish media industry. For the NRS the
company is engaged on a development project to combine newspaper and magazine
readership information with website audiences measured by UKOM.
Steve
Wilcox, RSMB’s Managing Director, comments:
“RSMB has
acquired a great deal of experience in data fusion and similar techniques over
the years and we believe that now is the time to focus on this business in a
more formal way. The growing complexity
of advertising and fragmentation of media is making it almost impossible to
undertake conventional cross-media studies or indeed to measure all platforms
through which media properties are delivered in a single research survey. Data
fusion, properly designed and tested, increasingly offers clients the only
practical alternative solution.”
Lynne
Robinson, Research Director of the IPA added:
“The growing use of
the TouchPoints ChannelPlanner is stimulating the interest in the use of data
integration as a key measurement tool for the media industry. I therefore welcome and encourage RSMB's
decision to invest further in this important area."
For
further information please contact:
Steve
Wilcox – 020 7808 3600
Note to
editors:
1. About
RSMB. RSMB was founded in 1987 and has held
contracts with BARB (Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board Ltd) for over twenty
years. Currently the company holds ‘Contract A’ which covers the design,
methodology and quality control of the BARB service. The company is also a contractor to RAJAR
(Radio Joint Audience Research Ltd.) and in addition to data fusion projects, provides a range of data analysis services to the
advertising and media industry.
2. About Data
Fusion. Strictly speaking this term should only be
used where two sets of data are brought together at the individual respondent
level. The data from two or more surveys
are combined by matching respondents from each survey using a range of ‘hooks’
– information available from each survey – for instance demographics, attitudes
or general media consumption patterns. A
number of analysis techniques are available to test the quality of the achieved
fusion. In practise the term ‘fusion’ is
often used more generally to cover other approaches – including integrating
surveys at an aggregated (rather than respondent) level and ascribing or
imputing missing data in order to enhance databases.