Dive Brief:
- Nielsen Catalina Solutions and Opera MediaWorks are combining forces to provide consumer packaged goods companies such as Mars and Dean Foods with customer purchase data to test and target video ads.
- The targeted ads will be based on past purchase behavior and served on mobile web browsers and in-app as pre- and post-roll video, potentially reaching shoppers in stores.
- Campaign segmentation, targeting and analytics will be based on Nielsen Catalina Solutions' database of 90 million households.
Dive Insight:
Alex Stone, director of digital for Horizon Media, told Ad Age, "Because we're using that shopper data, we're definitely limiting the amount of waste."
The overall goal of the effort is to find out how sales are affected by the video content, the shopping basket size, the consumer's purchase frequency, and the device type and time of day.
This partnership illustrates the importance of video advertising, and mobile video specifically. It also is an example of Nielsen going beyond TV measurements and figuring out cross-platform audiences, with their joint venture, NCS.
Nielsen EVP Megan Clarken told Adweek last fall, "What we have to do to perform a cross-platform total audience measurement is line all of those numbers up, so they have to be apples-to-apples comparisons. They have to follow the same underlying rules. They have to be on a single-sourced platform, because otherwise you're cobbling numbers together and creating Frankenmetrics."