Nielsen’s specialty is media measurement, not mar tech.
But a slew of new Nielsen Marketing Cloud wins may help change that perception.
Despite the presence of data management platforms from Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle, Nielsen Marketing Cloud just had its largest-ever quarter for new DMP client wins since it acquired eXelate in 2015.
CPG marketers were a large part of the success, said Damian Garbaccio, EVP of the Nielsen Marketing Cloud. He’s taking over for Mark Zagorski, who became CEO of Tremor in June.
“It was a little fortuitous that five to six of the largest top-20 CPGs all happened to do RFPs for DMPs in the first year of our acquisition,” said Garbaccio.
Garbaccio, the former eXelate CRO, now reports directly to Nielsen’s US Media president, Lynda Clarizio.
But Nielsen Marketing Cloud didn’t always sit under Clarizio’s commercial team – it recently transitioned from the product leadership group manned by Nielsen product maven Megan Clarken.
That transition helped spur Nielsen Marketing Cloud’s DMP wins because it could now access Nielsen Watch clients who use the measurement company’s ratings system.
For instance, it recently secured audio network Westwood One and Panoply Media, a podcasting company backed by local-TV station owner Graham Holdings, as clients.
Also, Nielsen Marketing Cloud was able to connect product strategy and development more closely to commercial delivery and sales.
“Lynda Clarizio’s group is really connected to brands, agency teams, media platforms and social clients directly, so in that respect, we’ve been working more in tandem on the product leadership, strategy and commercial sides,” Garbaccio said.
However, new Nielsen Marketing Cloud sales opportunities aren’t limited to Nielsen’s Watch business.
Garbaccio said about half of DMP/Nielsen Marketing Cloud clients are also Nielsen Buy clients who purchase shopper or consumer insights data but don’t necessarily license its tech.
And because many CPG companies can’t access first-party data (that data typically stays with the retailer), they often fill in the gaps with Nielsen Catalina’s purchase data on 140 million individuals.
Tying in this data lets Nielsen offer better pricing and efficiency to clients, since it rolls in data and measurement with technology.
And it’s that combination of data, attribution and measurement that has helped Nielsen Marketing Cloud win more RFPs, Garbaccio said.
Nielsen Marketing Cloud next hopes to connect to more Nielsen measurement products, such as its sales effectiveness tools, Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) and the Nielsen Media Impact tool for ad buyers, the latter of which just rolled into Garbaccio and his team’s purview.
“The goal is to have a single Nielsen measurement and mar tech tagging structure to allow all our products to coexist,” Garbaccio said.
Although those integrations could take upward of six to 12 months, Garbaccio is optimistic Nielsen can execute.
“We need these data and measurement products to be easy for clients to consume,” he said. “That means implementing a universal tag and always-on measurement, [so when tagging a site] all of that impression-level data can be captured so any time the client runs a multitouch attribution or DAR study, they have that information in real time.”
