Databases are boring.

Nobody gets excited about a database the way they would a great piece of creative. There are no database launch parties nor are there any database awards.

But when you add the Internet to a database some interesting things happen.

Napster and other file-swapping sites are database driven and they are reponsible for millions lost in revenue in the music industry. LavaLife is a database that attracts well over two million Canadians monthly. Expedia and the like are databases that have changed the way people book travel to the tune of $9.1 billion. All of these have revolutionary implications on certain business segments and on society. So is there a Napster for the advertising and media business?

Napsters are not born from established players but against established players. They represent a pent-up frustration with the current model. So the likelihood of the Napster-like database for advertising, coming out of PMB, BBM or NADbank is nil. To find possible advertising Napsters, we have to look at the new players.

TiVo is very Internet-like. It’s a two-way channel that records people’s clickstream through media content and delivers that information back to a database. I would argue the TiVo database is the beginning of the advertising Napster.

While the number of Tivo’ed households may not reach mass media numbers, it certainly is a large number for a ratings sample. Getting access to this database to find shows where the audience actually watches the commercials will certainly change the value proposition of TV for media buyers. In this cutthroat competitive market where something as small as the promise of a 5% difference in cost per thousand can be the point that wins the media AOR, knowing which shows have 30% viewership versus 70% viewership of the ads changes the value of a buy dramatically.

Does reach really matter? Clients want to sell product and reinforce their brands; should we not be optimizing the media plan based on vehicles that best achieve those results? Here again the advertising Napster will have a huge impact on how we measure campaigns and subsequently optimize our channel choices.

Comscore Media Metrix is an Internet-connected database that delivers media consumption numbers and actual purchase data.

It can also faciliate intercept interviews in general or at the point of purchase. In other words it is a single source of data to measure brand and purchase and the only one tied directly to an advertising medium.

Some would argue that online measurement would skew the data to reflect the online audience.

Not so, according to Rex Briggs of Marketing Evolution, who conducted four Cross Media Optimization Studies (XMOS) on behalf of the Internet Advertising Bureau in the U.S. He discovered that penetration of online across demographics was such that the results applied to the population as a whole.

Speaking of Briggs and the IAB, keep an eye on New York-based Dynamic Logic, the company which did the background technology measurement for XMOS. It measures the brand effects of campaigns but, by using the online channel, has added all the benefits of an online database. It can gather more data more quickly and have it ready to analyze immediately. It has a larger group of people to query and can hit them with the survey at important moments in the purchase cycle.

Interestingly, it can also aggregate the results so end users can benchmark their campaigns against their category competition. And, its work for the IAB U.S. is pointing to optimizing campaigns on brand effects instead of reach and frequency, and it is the only methodology that includes online in the media mix.

Whether any one of these represents enough of a challenge to business as usual in advertising is worthy of debate. But once all this data exists in a digital format and is accessible, somebody is going to write an interface that integrates all of it. While we may not have a Napster for advertising right now, we certainly have the building blocks for one.

Chris Williams is director of interactive marketing at Arnold Brand Response in Toronto. He can be reached at cwilliams@arnoldworlwide.ca.