Nielsen Combines Consumer, Television & Magazine Audience Information.

Nielsen Media Research and Kantar Media Research announced an agreement whereby audience information from their respective television and magazine databases will be merged into a single database. The new service, for media planners and buyers, is the first of its kind in the United States.

The new service will fuse data from Nielsen Media Research’s National People Meter database, which is the foundation for nationwide television audience measurement in the U.S., and KMR’s Multimedia Audience Research Systems (MARS), the first national survey of pharmaceutical products and readership of General and Health related magazines.

The service expands and improves on custom products that the companies had previously offered. It is the next step in the evolution of advertising research that integrates consumer information and media research.

The data fusion service, which will be marketed separately by Nielsen Media Research and KMR to their respective customers, will be overseen by Dr.Roland Soong, KMR’s Chief Technical Officer and Paul Donato, Chief Research Officer for Nielsen Media Research.

“Data fused into a single, accessible source is a great tool for the truly committed media planner,” said Soong, who has conducted similar research recently for the Mexican, Brazilian and Argentine markets. “It is exactly the efficient, time-saving, seamless mechanism that advertising agencies have been asking for to enable media planning for a real-life media mix.”

The utility of the fused television and magazine readership database will come from gaining the best benefits of the magazine measurement and marketing information from MARS plus the detailed television audience estimates from Nielsen Media Research into a single, compatible format. The new product is expected to be available in the 4th quarter of 2001.

For more informatgion at http://www.nielsenmedia.com.