Dive Brief:
- Data analytics company Circana has completed its acquisition of Nielsen’s Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) business, the company announced. Financial terms were not disclosed.
- The unit will be integrated into Circana’s media team, alongside NCSolutions, which Circana acquired in June. The combined team will be led by Cara Pratt, Circana’s president of global retail and media.
- The acquisition of Nielsen’s MMM business significantly expands Circana’s global marketing analytical footprint and capabilities while also enabling the company to offer a more comprehensive, end-to-end measurement platform.
Dive Insight:
Circana’s acquisition of Nielsen’s MMM practice is a bid for the company to become “the industry’s leading media measurement business,” according to president and CEO Stuart Aitken. The move enables the company to offer a more comprehensive measurement platform that addresses everything from media planning and targeting to in-flight optimization and post-campaign analysis.
“MMM's sophisticated analytics – combined with our existing assets – are expected to provide unparalleled insights into optimizing our clients’ marketing investments across every channel,” said Aitken in release details.
As media has become both more fragmented and more trackable — and while marketers are under even more pressure to prove the impact of their work — MMMs have returned to vogue. Using statistical analysis tools, MMMs enable marketers to measure media channels, including television, radio, out of home, and, increasingly, digital, to help uncover how those channels affect the entire customer funnel.
The renewed interest in MMMs is evident. Last year, Google launched its own MMM, Meridian, and, in doing so, cited Kantar data indicating that 60% of U.S. advertisers were using MMMs, and 58% of those who were not using them were considering doing so in the future. Alaska Airlines recently identified a projected $100 million of increased addressable advertising revenue using Google’s MMM.
Similarly, some are looking to leverage artificial intelligence to build models that predict consumer behavior and audience targeting. WPP, for instance, this summer unveiled Open Intelligence, a so-called large marketing model (LMM) that uses media data to predict audience behavior and market performance.
