IRI, Nielsen announce joint venture to recruit, maintain panelists for consumer shopping panels
CHICAGO Information Resources Inc. and The Nielsen Co. on Tuesday announced that they have formed a U.S. production joint venture to recruit, maintain and process data from a common set of households to support the Nielsen Homescan and IRI Consumer Network panels. While the pool of households will be owned by the joint venture, the techniques used for projecting, analyzing and delivering insights across the respective panels will remain proprietary to each company.
The jointly-owned venture will begin operation during the first quarter 2010 using the existing Nielsen household sample and data acquisition infrastructure. The joint venture will draw from a subset of existing IRI households to replace panelists as they naturally drop from the original sample. A complete history of data (five years of back data) will be available to both Nielsen and IRI, and each company will use its own unique intellectual property (data reference, projections, technology, etc.) to produce delivery of its respective consumer panel.
Under the joint venture agreement, Nielsen receives 100% of the targeted 100,000-plus households and IRI has access to 86%, with the right to acquire up to 100% after two years. The joint venture will be governed by a board equally represented by IRI and Nielsen officers and an independent CEO to be recruited from outside both companies.
“Now more than ever, Nielsen will be able to quickly and aggressively build unique and actionable consumer and shopper insights for our clients,” stated Nielsen Consumer North America president and CEO John Lewis. “The joint venture panel will serve as a critical insights foundation, and Nielsen will integrate its assets and our clients’ assets like never before as we seek even bigger client business breakthroughs. Clients tell us time and again that we must do more to capture the opportunities of today’s highly volatile and fragmented consumer landscape, and the joint venture will be an enabling step.”
“We have an aggressive innovation agenda focused on delivering superior consumer and shopper insights to our clients,” added IRI President and CEO John Freeland. “This joint venture is yet another step in furthering that focus and enables IRI to concentrate on the consumer panel innovations that really matter — increased speed to insight via new technologies, deeper and broader insights covering a full 360° view of the consumer, and new automated analytics to accurately predict changing shopper attitudes and behaviors.”
In addition, IRI’s RxPulse Patient Panel will be replaced by a new Rx panel recruited by the joint venture and will be designed to maintain the continuity of IRI’s current RxPulse panel. Nielsen will have access to the Rx household data and will continue to be the sole provider of its Hispanic specialty panel.