The agreement between the two companies will allow the scoring of device-level TV viewing data sets with age/sex propensities and other MRI-Simmons attributes for targeted advertising sales, and pre- and post-campaign reporting.

The system will work by DatafuelX using its modelling capability, ProfileX, to layer MRI-Simmons data, including age, sex and other demographic attributes, onto device-level TV viewing data sets.

The companies said this would allow an advertiser which wants to run an addressable campaign against its desired demographic audiences to identify which US TV sets are most likely to be viewed.

The service will be offered to automatic content recognition (ACR) and set top box (STB) providers in the US.

MRI-Simmons is co-owned by GfK and SymphonyAI Group, with GfK as the majority partner, and was launched as a joint venture in 2019, while DatafuelX is an analytics and technology provider specialising in multi-currency, cross-platform optimisation for the television industry. 

Howard Shimmel, head of strategy at DatafuelX, said: “The industry has long had the ability to profile device-level TV viewing data using household attributes.

“With this new solution, we will be able to identify the TVs that are actually being viewed by this demographic, based on the MRI-Simmons modelling attributes and actual viewership of that TV.”

Brian Katz, head of advanced advertising at MRI-Simmons, said: “MRI-Simmons has been a trusted resource for media planning and advertising sales for decades and was quickly adopted for TV in the early days of data-driven linear.

“By partnering with DatafuelX, that same trusted data can be used to personify any ACR and set-top box datasets, allowing advertisers to run addressable campaigns against a desired demographic audience.”