• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 29, 2023

If you work for media researcher Magid in its Minneapolis headquarters, chances are you're a middle-aged White person with a household income of nearly $100,000 and you fit into proprietary consumer lifestyle segments such as "Cruisin' to Retirement," "Empty Nests," and "Gray Power."

How do I know this? Because that's how audience-segmentation giant Claritas delineates the geo-demographic composition of people living in Magid's neighborhood when you put its 55437 ZIP Code into Claritas' Prizm look-up utility.

Why did I look it up? Because Magid and Claritas sent me a press release Thursday announcing a deal to integrate some of Magid's proprietary consumer media research into Claritas' audience segmentation system and I couldn't think of a better way to illustrate it.

Claritas, of course, is one of the grandaddies of geo-demographic consumer segmentation, although these days it downplays that seemingly quaint science and touts itself as "a data-driven marketing leader that helps marketers achieve superior ROI" by "leveraging strategic acquisitions and a distinctive identity graph."

At least that's how they described it in their release, so I figured I'd break it down in more accessible -- and visual -- terms.

And while audience-segmentation suppliers with proprietary identity graphs may seem like they're a dime a dozen these days, Claritas has a half century history of helping brand marketers and media planners and buyers translate what their custom -- as well as their syndicated audience -- data means in terms of the people they are actually targeting in real neighborhoods.

Now that might seem like an overly simplistic way of describing what they do, and to be sure, Claritas continues to innovate the core science -- adapting to digital data, and adopting machine learning and AI to help do it, but that's the core of its data marketing science.

Magid, meanwhile, has an equally storied history, as a media audience researcher. It was launched in 1956 by the late Frank Magid, who was originally dubbed the "the nation's leading television news doctor" for helping to advise U.S. TV stations on how to compete in their local news programming and ratings battles. He literally created the "Action News" format of evening news programming.

Like Claritas, Magid as continued to innovate, adapt to digital media and adopt new ways of surveying, analyzing and advising media pros, often on the supply-side, and most recently in the rapidly emerging streaming and CTV programming marketplace.

Not surprisingly, that's the Magid product being integrated into Claritas' audience segmentation systems.

Dubbed "SubScape," the study was introduced earlier this year and focuses on an increasingly important consumer segment for the TV and streaming marketplace: subscribers.

The database is not simply a consumer survey study, but utilizes Magid's data science team, who apply a variety of techniques such as "Net Promoter Scores," etc., to understand the value, market share and churn related to streaming services subscribers.

The bottom line: Beginning in the first quarter of 2024, Claritas users will be able to run campaigns targeting explicit subsets of the streaming population based on values they represent to their business.

And since fair is fair, I figured I'd leave you with Claritas' Prizm analysis of its own 45236 ZIP Code for its Cincinnati, Ohio headquarters' neighborhood, which shows its organization also is likely composed of middle-aged White people, but earning an annual income that is about 23% less than Magid's team.