Retail and audience measurement is the work of measuring what a whole country buys in shops and watches on screens, by combining shops' sales records with fixed panels of households. Brands, retailers, TV channels and advertisers buy the results by subscription. The method is explained in consumer panels and retail audits.
No company can count every sale or every viewer in a country. So measurement companies count a carefully chosen sample, and scale it up. A sample of shops, chosen to represent every region, town size and type of shop, reports what it sold. A panel of households, chosen to represent the population, records what it buys or watches. Statistics then estimate the whole country from the sample.
Take, for example, a soap and detergent maker based in Nagpur. It wants three numbers. What share of all the detergent sold in Maharashtra last month was its own? How many people saw its new TV advertisement? And how big is the detergent market in Bangladesh, where it may start selling?
The first answer comes from retail measurement. It combines the sales that supermarkets record at their tills with regular stock counts at a sample of kirana stores. It then tells the brand its share in each region.
The second answer comes from audience measurement. A meter in each panel household records which channel is on, and who in the family is watching. The resulting ratings tell advertisers how many people saw each advertisement break, and so how much the slot was worth.
The third answer comes from market research data, which estimates the size of every product category in every country.
These datasets are then joined to others. A brand feeds its retail sales figures into marketing mix modelling, to estimate what its advertising added to sales. Retailers use the same sales data in price and promotion optimisation, to decide discounts. All three products are examples of data as a service (DaaS).