Panel research is the foundation of Mediascope measurements. Panel data provides an idea of human behavior in the media, socio-demographic profile of the audience, of content preferences and other important parameters that are necessary for the company’s clients for their operational work and strategic planning of communications.
TV panel
The Mediascope TV panel includes more than 20 thousand people throughout Russia and represents the entire population of the country aged 4+. The company’s TV panel ranks fifth in the world in terms of its scale. TV meters — special devices that automatically collect information about watching TV are installed in the homes and dachas of the participants in the television study. The content and ads seen by the respondents are recognized with the audio matching technology used by the TV meters.
Internet panels
Mediascope uses two panels for the Internet measurements: a desktop one with more than 15 thousand respondents, and a mobile panel with more than 14 thousand respondents. They represent the entire population of Russia aged 12 +. Data on visiting various web-resources is collected using special measuring tools that are installed on the devices of the panel members. In case with the desktop devices, this is a special browser add-on, and it’s a measurement application as for the smartphones and tablets. Information about the audience is also collected using the company’s counters, which are posted on different web-pages and Internet sites.
For its Internet measurements Mediascope also uses external data provided by the partners, this is information about activity on the web sites provided by the Internet companies and it is completely anonymized. This information is processed together with the data from our internet panels.
Single-source
Some Mediascope projects use single-source panels that include respondents who simultaneously participate in several studies: TV and Internet measurements. Such panels are used, for example, in the Big TV Rating project, which is a study of TV content and advertising consumption in several environments at once: in linear broadcast and on the desktop devices using Internet. Data for such projects is collected via router meters. These are special devices that help analyze media consumption on all devices in the household that are connected to the Internet.
Mediascope Data Platform
In 2020, Mediascope launched its own platform for working with data, which collects and processes large amounts of heterogeneous data about a person’s contact with media and advertising, consumer behavior, including partner data.
Mediascope Data Platform is not only a technological platform, but also a new model for treating data on the entire advertising industry. When creating the platform, Mediascope focused not only on its own tasks for processing and analyzing data, but, first of all, on the industrial need for tools to work with an ever-growing volume of heterogeneous data and their sources.
All data in the platform is arranged into a single structure — an event-log, which describes in a unified format the contact with media and advertising: who watched the content or commercials, what exactly was seen, when and where. A layer of the aggregated «raw» data is stored in the platform in the form of data sets. The company’s clients can work with these data sets in a fundamentally new DataLab workspace.
Mediascope Data Platform is built on a stack of open-source technologies that are accessible and understandable to professional participants in the media advertising market. The technological basis of the platform is the Hadoop ecosystem, but other tools for streaming processing, streaming computing and self-service analytics are also used to work with the data.
DataLab
DataLab is a workspace for independent analysis of the data stored at the Mediascope Data Platform. With DataLab, customers get quick access to the «raw» data layer and can extract the value of in-depth and advanced analytics for their business.
In DataLab, data analysts and data scientists can work on the insights about the audience behavior, test marketing hypotheses and product ideas, create new algorithmic solutions to improve business and advertising communications efficiency.
DataLab users can independently use mathematical tools for processing «raw» data, which are implemented in the platform as a self-service. Mediascope provides clients with the necessary amount of cloud computing power to work in DataLab alongside with a complete set of descriptive documentation on data transformation and algorithmic calculations. If necessary Mediascope can accompany clients’ pilot projects.
Data supply
There are several ways to work with Mediascope data:
- Special client software — for the analysis of pre-calculated audience data of individual studies and media planning
- API — for special requests to the data of individual projects
- DataLab — for queries to the «raw» data layer in the Mediascope Data Platform. Queries can be made in one of three programming languages — Python, SQL and R through the common open-source frameworks.
- BI-system Tableau — for data analysis and visualization of both individual Mediascope projects and calculations based on «raw» data.
