TvSpan a joint venture project between Meridian Broadcasting TSMS and Taylor Nelson Sofres has been in operation since March 1996 with 750 Superpanel homes in the Meridian ITV region equipped with TV setmeters in addition to the scanning equipment they have to record the details of their purchases of fmcg products. Thus tvSpan provides a continuous measurement of both product purchasing and TV viewing from the same households - i.e. single source data and hence provides us with the means to address the issues of recency frequency and the duration of the effects of TV advertising.
This paper deals with the fusion of BARB TV viewing information onto Superpanel, AGB's consumer purchasing panel. It breaks new ground in terms of the fusion technique used. Rather than matching panel members by commonly held demographic characteristics, the matching process is performed on individuals' TV viewing habits. This has been achieved by administering a detailed viewing questionnaire to each Superpanel housewife covering their viewing by daypart, selected programmes by channel, programme genres and the types of programme they enjoy. Thus the claimed viewing habits of Superpanel respondents are matched against the metered viewing behaviour of the BARB panel members. The resultant fused dataset contains the actual purchasing of individual Superpanel housewives together with their individual probabilities of viewing each commercial television channel at a given time (i.e. every commercial break).