Couch to Supermarket: Connecting Dots†

New Firm Will Match Data From Cable Boxes, Frequent-Shopper Cards

Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2008 — Web marketers can easily tell whether a particular consumer visited a specific site, when she visited, and whether she bought something. But despite a decades-long head start, television advertisers haven't been as successful connecting the shows people watch to the products they buy.

Now a new media research company, TRA — for "True ROI Accountability for Media" — is taking another crack at the problem. It merges data from people's cable set-top boxes with consumer-purchase databases, such as the information stores gather from frequent-shopper cards. For instance, a company could see whether households that watched an ad for its toothpaste later bought that brand of toothpaste.