Nielsen’s TV Brand Effect (TVBE) business now belongs to Phoenix Marketing International, a performance measurement and metrics company.
Phoenix on Monday acquired the syndicated service, which is used by brands to measure recall of television ads based on Nielsen data.
The companies declined to share the price of the deal.
Nielsen will continue to operate the TVBE service for one year, after which the 200-person team will transition to Phoenix’s management, said Phoenix CEO Allen DeCotiis.
Phoenix also signed a multiyear deal for access to the Nielsen survey data that powers the service.
The acquisition is a major expansion for Phoenix and represents a strong horizontal land grab in the television metrics category, DeCotiis said.
Nielsen’s TVBE assets will enable Phoenix to more than double its current headcount of around 160 employees and to increase its yearly run rate from $40 million in revenue last year to $86 million.
In an internal review, Nielsen decided the TVBE group was no longer consistent with its portfolio optimization strategy.
It’s also possible dwindling linear TV subscribers or new CPG marketing practices made it more worthwhile for Nielsen to offload its TVBE business than to keep it.
“Nielsen regularly reviews our product portfolio to ensure we have the right mix of capabilities and services to address the needs of our clients today and in the future,” the company said in a statement.
Only about 5% of Phoenix’s customers overlap with TVBE data syndicators, and the Nielsen service has particularly strong traction in the consumer packaged goods vertical, where Phoenix traditionally hasn’t applied its performance-based measurement.
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Phoenix’s measurement revenue is split about evenly between television and digital media.
“[This] brings together two competing but different metrics, our analytical modeling based on interviews and [the TVBE] next-day recall measurement,” DeCotiis said. “But TVBE is going to enhance our other data products, especially as the whole marketing mix becomes more performance-oriented.”
