Nielsen Catalina Ventures in offing

This is seen as a more successful bid that Nielsen's Arbitron joint venture which saw it dump the project after investing jointly over USD 50 million plus in it by the high costs incurred to use scanners by media panelists.

Other methodology include the less expensive and intrusive ones used by TRA which combined data from set top boxes.

The Nielsen Catalina venture is something inbetween, taking data from the 45000 odd panelists of Nielsen who won't have to use scanners to gauge market behavior and product details will be tracked by a third party keeping purchase details anonymous, focusing like TRA on both online and TV data, with Nielsen rival ComScore abstaining from TV.

This technique may be used to study consumer behavior and give brands and sub brands more segmented information which may positively affect their demand, helping companies to gauge the metric of shifts, lapsed users and preferences.

Although Catalina doesn't gauge the data of larger retailers such as Walmart and Costco, Nielsen plans to remedy this by taking information from set top boxes and other data and analytics.

Tougher times ahead seen a decrease in consumption due to lower pay, lay-offs, less availability of credit, leading research companies to ask how they can maintain that analytical edge.