Ipsos MediaCT White Paper: Data Fusion

Data fusion denotes merging two or more surveys by matching up respondents on common variables or ‘hooks’, such as demographics, lifestyle, and media and product preferences. It has proven most useful for combining media exposure with product consumption data, providing valuable insights for media planning.

The main attraction of fusion is to avoid the commercial and technical difficulties in capturing all the data of interest in a single-source survey.

Fusion has a long and chequered history, which provides the structure for this paper: how it started, how it stumbled (but recovered), leading on to the present, and its future potential. On this clothes horse will be hung a glimpse of fusion’s technical undergarments, discussion of the importance of hooks, fusion’s changing fashions and other material aspects...