Nielsen Catalina Solutions Launches Industry Research Project to Understand How to Grow Brands

Leading brands, media companies and organizations come together in study with unprecedented scope

Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS), the leading ad targeting and sales attribution provider for the CPG industry, and Nielsen, the global audience measurement leader, have launched a new industry research study aimed at understanding the best strategy for building CPG brands. For the first time, the advertising industry will have a holistic view of the measures that determine how a brand grows across time, and will be able to understand the importance of each piece of the media mix in a brand’s success.

Partnering with leading CPG advertisers, media companies and industry organizations, NCS and The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute are analyzing over six billion rows of data from 50 brands across 3.5 years to understand the best strategies for building brands in today’s media environment. The research will look at who the most likely potential buyers of a product are, and determine how to best influence future purchases using the five pillars of advertising: creative, reach, targeting, recency, and context. It will also answer the long-standing question about whether to target existing brand buyers to increase loyalty and maintain share or to grow the brand’s base by targeting light and non-brand buyers.

“In the advertising industry, there’s more data available today than there’s ever been before. Brands have greater ability to deliver messages to more specific audiences, but we haven’t had the tools to understand the implications of targeting decisions,” said Leslie Wood, Chief Research Officer, Nielsen Catalina Solutions. “This study will put the pieces together and deliver insights on how media and creative decisions contribute to a brand’s growth over time.”

“One of the decisions that marketers continue to grapple with is how to target their marketing dollars. Choices range from targeting existing buyers of the brand, e.g. loyalists, to targeting future category buyers to grow penetration,” said Professor Byron Sharp, Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and author of How Brands Grow. “Of course, many brands do both with different campaigns. We are seeking to find out the right balance for brands that really want to achieve substantial growth.”

The following advertisers, media companies and institutions have signed on to participate in this project:

• Advertisers: Anheuser-Busch InBev, The Hershey Company, Kellogg, L’Oreal USA, Mars, Mondelēz International, Nestle Purina, Reynolds Consumer Products and more
• Media companies: CBS Corporation, Facebook, NBCUniversal, Pinterest, Turner
• Organizations: Advertising Research Foundation, The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Longman-Moran Analytics

The initial findings of this multi-phased research will be presented in spring of 2018.

About Nielsen Catalina Solutions

NCS (Nielsen Catalina Solutions) is a purchase-based ad targeting and ROAS measurement firm serving the CPG industry. NCS integrates in-store purchase data from nearly 90 million households with media exposure data from TV, online, mobile, print, radio and CRM to help consumer packaged goods advertisers, agencies and media companies define their most valuable audience, reach them with advertising and measure incremental sales driven by ad campaigns. The joint venture between Nielsen and Catalina has helped over 200 advertisers and 450+ brands optimize ad performance to drive revenue growth and increase return on ad spend. Visit us at http://www.ncsolutions.com to learn more.

About Nielsen

Nielsen Holdings plc (NYSE: NLSN) is a global performance management company that provides a comprehensive understanding of what consumers watch and buy. Nielsen's Watch segment provides media and advertising clients with Total Audience measurement services for all devices on which content—video, audio and text—is consumed. The Buy segment offers consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers the industry's only global view of retail performance measurement. By integrating information from its Watch and Buy segments and other data sources, Nielsen also provides its clients with analytics that help improve performance. Nielsen, an S&P 500 company, has operations in over 100 countries, covering more than 90% of the world’s population. For more information, visit www.nielsen.com.

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Nielsen Catalina SolutionsLeanne Pinault, [e-mail]