Analytics driven game changing moments come when someone finds new data to crunch, new ways to crunch existing data, or the angle on the data that no one else is looking at.  TiVo seems to banking on providing at least two out of three as it takes on Nielson with its new Stop/Watch Local offering.

Stop/Watch Local will offer advertiser second-by-second information on who’s watching (and fast-forwarding) what. According to USA Today:

“TiVo will offer stations, advertisers and program producers year-round, second-by-second information about the shows and commercials watched by people who have one of the company’s DVRs. The anonymous data will come directly from the boxes.”

TiVo will use a larger sample size than Nielson (5,000 to 25,000 vs. 400 to 900) but TiVo users are only representative of a certain segment of the viewing public — they are wealthier and better educated than average. Still, Stop/Watch Local promises to provide programmers and advertisers much more granular data with which to work.

Of course what all of this is likely to show is how much advertising many of us speed through. This shouldn’t be a big surprise: advertising for something  you are not in the market to buy can be uninteresting at best and annoying at worst. Direct marketers learned long ago that you have to tolerate large amounts of waste in order to find the people open to your offer on any given day. Broadcast advertising has focused on reach and frequency without a strong way to measure action. Stop/Watch Local would seem to bring something more like Web analytics to television and that will likely fuel advertisers to drive down costs to compensate for the waste that comes with any broadcast media.

This new trove of viewing information may help also shed light on how often you need to be seen in order to reach buyers cost-effectively and to be top of mind when a potential customer embarks on the journey toward purchase. After all, I may not be looking to change my bank or buy a car today but I might be next week or next month and those accumulated messages will, in part, determine where I start my search.

Scrolling through the comments on the USA Today story, there are many concerns about privacy and TiVo making money selling information about users’ viewing habits. This may be that people don’t realize how much of their data is sold, traded, etc. already. It should be noted that TiVo says that the data being provided is anonymous.

What do you think of this new offering? Do you think that the larger sample size balances the limitations on audience composition? Will this be a serious threat to Nielson or a complement to it? What would be the first behavioral patterns you’d look for? How real are the privacy concerns?