Nielsen's Harris Interactive Buy Strengthens Insights for CPG and Media Clients

Nielsen has bought Harris Interactive for $116.6 million, further advancing its social and digital insights for CPG and media clients.

harris interactive logoNielsen Holdings is acquiring Harris Interactive in a deal valued at $116.6 million. The move that will strengthen the consumer insights firm’s services to its CPG and media clients, said J. Lewis, Nielsen’s president for the Americas.

Combined forces should bring more emphasis on social and digital; this comes at the conclusion of Harris’ turnaround efforts initiated in July 2011, the market research firm’s president and CEO, Al Angrisani said in a statement. He added that the agreement with Nielsen was in line with the latter’s strategic tie-ups in the past months.

Nielsen has recently gone through a series of alliances. In October, Nielsen joined forces with CBS to measure cross-media campaigns on local television and radion. It also partnered with Experian Marketing Services to expand Nielsen’s existing demographics reports to include items such as household income, family size and education. The solution is currently in beta version and is expected to release in 2014.

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The same month, it also launched its Nielsen Twitter TV Rankings, with metrics providing data such as the number of people viewing TV-related tweets, for instance. (More from us on a related topic: Will Twittervision Transform US TV Advertising?)

Back in September, Nielsen took over Arbitron (now renamed Nielsen Audio) to complement its arsenal for measuring media and advertising across television, online, mobile and radio. Nielsen Audio now tracks a mind boggling eight hours a day per person of dynamic media consumption.

In August, Nielsen acquired R.R. Bowker to boost its book portfolio with business intelligence and commerce solutions (also the names of the products themselves). Thanks to this deal, Nielsen can measure the impact of ebook sales in the U.S. and U.K. markets, providing insights and trends around the volume and value of book sales by various demographic criteria. It also enables Nielsen to offer a B2B service that lets retailers source and order books throughout the English-language book market.

Nielsen, whose motto is “What People Watch. What People Buy,” looks set for taking the digital and advertising space by storm with more comprehensive and deeper data. It’s a gold mine and headache at once for marketers and advertisers, as the landscape shifts towards contextualized and personalized everything.

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