RSMB said it is looking to recruit a head of business development to work with its statistical and IT teams to “enhance and promote” the firm’s data fusion offering to new and existing clients. The appointee will be supported by newly-recruited technical staff, RSMB said.

Managing director Steve Wilcox said: “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 solution.”

In its work with the NRS, RSMB is developing a system to combine newspaper and magazine readership information with website audiences data collected by UKOM, the industry-backed online measurement body. For the IPA the company is responsible for bringing together media usage data from the Touchpoints survey with ratings from each of the main media planning currencies to create a multimedia planning database.