This has been a big day for us marketing at retail folks. First we heard from Deloitte that in-store marketing is growing at an even faster rate than Internet advertising. Now we learn that the Nielsen Company along with the In-Store Marketing Institute and the P.R.I.S.M Project have made, "substantial progress in a breakthrough project that will make stores a measurable marketing medium. After reaching key research milestones, Nielsen In-Store will syndicate the data in 2008, giving retailers and manufacturers exhaustive intelligence that will help them rethink in-store marketing to improve the shopper experience," according to this article on Yahoo! Finance.
The article also goes into some of the specifics of the research, noting that, "the current nationwide trial was initiated by Nielsen In-Store on April 29, 2007, and counts traffic in store aisles both digitally and manually. By the time the trial ends in late December, Nielsen In-Store will have studied more than 160 stores, capturing over 60% of the All Commodity Volume (ACV) of products in food, drug and mass retailers."
This development will go a long way toward quantifying and highlighting the value of the sales floor as valuable marketing medium. Nielsen's numbers are the gold standard for audience measurement in other media, and their name will hopefully provide an air of accuracy and fairness that non-industry types will recognize and accept.
Of course, the data that will be syndicated in 2008 won't be perfect, but provided it isn't purely fabricated it will still be better than nothing, which is basically what we have right now.
Tags: Nielsen, in-store advertising, out-of-home advertising
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4 comments:
We need to be careful with this one and not get overly excited. :) PRISM as an initiative was not created to support digital signage. It's very focused on quantifying the floor space itself for merchandising, endcaps, shelf talkers, etc.
George over at Nielsen has even commented that he's unsure how well it will support our industry and it's not really a focus for the study.
Regardless, I'm looking forward to seeing the results
Agreed, however, the degree to which it's applicable depends on your measurement strategy. IIRC George was concerned because it didn't differentiate between different kinds of impressions.
Personally, I have no love for CPM-based metrics for POP displays (whether static or dynamic), and thus feel that the raw data from the Nielsen study will be useful simply as a measure of in-store activity.
And, you know, Phil's the new guy here, so he hasn't had the chance to get as jaded as the rest of us yet ;)
Phil,
Thanks for posting this. I'm interested in learning more more about in-store marketing.
There have been some remarkable accomplishments in the past few years in terms of in-store marketing, with GPS-enabled carts, self scan, and the diffusion/adoption of self checkouts, just to name a few.
I am excited to see the results that Nielsen collected. Hopefully, Nielsen will continue and grow this project after the initial data is released in 2008.
Craig,
You're welcome. As someone who is also new to in-store marketing, I think this is pretty exciting news.
Granted, people who are more experienced in this business like Rob and Bill probably have reasons to be a little skeptical. But for me, I trust Nielsen because they are a well-established company and I think their involvement will only further in-store marketing. It might just take some time.
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