In a media industry report yesterday, a story claimed VNU's Nielsen in the past several weeks has begun pitching clients on a "new research product designed to provide similar data as Apollo, but using a controversial method known as Fusion."

We asked Nielsen Chief Research Officer Paul Donato and SVP/Client Insights Howard Shimmel if this was true and to clarify.

"We have never said anything like that," said Donato. "The Fusion offering is not at all similar to Apollo, it's completely different. We began working on Fusion over four years ago and this is probably the third time we've gone to market with a product. One we've done in conjunction with Kantar Media; the second one, we tried a HomeScan Fusion a few years ago, but it wasn't as successful as we had hoped for. This is the second time we've done a Fusion with HomeScan, and there are other Fusions on the horizon. This is a form of data integration and there's multiple parties out there right now offering fusions. It is really a method for integrating consumer data with buying demographics - - a tool for media planning."

The story had said Nielsen execs showed some of the results at the recent client meeting and assured clients that "the system was a statistically valid way of achieving Apollo-like results." While Fusion is a tool for media planners, Apollo is a tool for advertisers to measure ROI by virtue of how it's conducted. One of the reasons there is so much interest in Apollo from the advertisers' side is because it will provide a direct measurement of ROI by the nature of it being a longitudinal panel where "we're tracking both people's product sales to product purchase behavior along with their media exposure to know directly if a given respondent was exposed to this commercial on radio, TV or the Internet, and then they went out and bought the product at a different rate then they bought before they were exposed," explained Donato. "Fusion's primary purpose is ROI evaluation. Its secondary purpose is cross-media planning. By the nature of the PPM and the nature of the Apollo panel doing online surveys, you have a single-source measurement of people's product purchase and their multimedia usage. But right now you don't have an electronic way to figure out for a given product category - - how much do I put in TV, how much do I put on the Internet, how much do I put in print? Apollo, because it's consumer-centric, can provide the means to figure out how to allocate across media. What Fusion does is allows users to go in and pick for national TV specifically, media planning to figure out daypart, networks and programming optimization."

Added Shimmel: "Right now we ask a certain number of consumer questions from the sample. And so people can look at ratings among movie-goers, among people who own certain kinds of cars. All Fusion does is extend that ability to product categories that we couldn't possibly ask all of our panelists. So it's a way of going beyond 18-49 year olds and 18-49 year olds who have a high probability of consuming a certain product. It's not a measure of ROI."

So what was actually presented at the client meeting that was mentioned in the article? Basically how different data sources can be fused - - something that modelers are already doing at many third party companies. "What we presented was the history of work that we had been doing, the fact that this technique had been in use in Europe for many, many years, and we presented an example of how the Fusion works using the new techniques that we developed. [The claim] is sort of like saying the data we collected in our sample about cars and movies is in competition with Apollo. That's crazy - - of course not," Shimmel recalled.

Meanwhile, in his quarterly conference call, Arbitron CEO Steve Morris told analysts that he was well aware of Nielsen's project to use Fusion to combine television data with Nielsen HomeScan data. "This has been around for a while. They've been working on this going back before Apollo started and they have talked to customers about it. Frankly, it strikes me as more of what is essentially a failed idea. Fusing television with product purchase data has been tried unsuccessfully in the UK and in Canada. The whole idea at this point in time of a system based on in-home, single media seems very anachronistic."

He said it runs counter to the kind of holistic marketing that P&G has been talking about and other major companies want, which is not served by single media data. Arbitron and VNU met with Project Apollo supporters Wednesday. He said at least two of those companies said they had already taken modeling - - "which is what Fusion is," Morris said - - as far as they could. He said they expressed a need for single-source data in order to make progress. As for Fusion, Morris said, "It's out there. I think, frankly, it's not an answer to contemporary questions, but it's something that I suppose if there's somebody who wants a very inexpensive product with a very limited amount of analysis, they might be able to get some benefit out of it. I don't think it's a direct competitor to Apollo and VNU certainly doesn't position it that way."