NEWS26 August 2009
US— Arch rivals Nielsen and Information Resources (IRI) are creating a joint venture company to recruit, maintain and process data from a common set of households to fuel each firm’s consumer purchase panels.
Nielsen’s Homescan and IRI’s Consumer Network panels will draw purchase information from the same pool of more than 100,000 homes – in effect, shifting the focus of the firm’s competition away from basic data provision towards the development and supply of advanced analytic tools.
A statement said: “This joint venture will allow both companies to reallocate their panel investment dollars from back-end data acquisition costs towards consumer insight innovation and client-facing improvements in speed, flexibility, quality and analytical capability.”
Nielsen’s existing household sample and data acquisition infrastructure will be used as the foundation of the joint venture, with a subset of existing IRI homes being called on to replace panellists who leave the original sample.
Initially, IRI will only have access to a sample of the joint venture panel that is equivalent to 86% of the current Nielsen sample, though it does have the option of upping this to 100% after two years.
Rob Holland, Nielsen’s senior vice president of product leadership in North America, told Research certain Nielsen staff would be “rebadged” as employees of the joint venture company, called The National Consumer Panel Company.
Some openings in the JV will also be available to IRI staff, said Bob Tomei, IRI’s president of consumer and shopper insights. Redundancies, it seems, are possible – though Tomei said the impact of the deal is “really not that significant” in terms of the numbers of staff affected as much of IRI’s back-end work is currently outsourced.
Holland and Tomei are two of five board directors of The National Consumer Panel Company, alongside IRI finance chief Michael Duffy, Nielsen’s chief legal officer James Cuminale and a chief executive officer of the JV who is still to be appointed.
The JV will be operational from the first quarter of 2010. The deal also sees IRI’s RxPulse Patient Panel replaced by a new Rx panel recruited by the joint venture. Nielsen will have access to the Rx household data and will continue to be the sole provider of its Hispanic specialty panel.