»
Kraft and Pfizer are joining P&G, Unilever and SC Johnson to support Project Apollo, a joint venture between Arbitron and VNU’s ACNielsen unit to create a single-source system that measures media exposure and product sales, Mediapost reports. Neither Kraft nor Pfizer have officially announced their participation, but their names were on an invitation that was sent to media companies for a meeting about Apollo taking place in New York next week.
The project has already installed more than 5,000 households with product scanning technology from ACNielsen and equipped more than 10,000 individuals in those homes with portable people meters from Arbitron. The PPMs will track media exposure of those individuals as they travel throughout their day while purchased products will be scanned by ACNielsen’s Homescan system. With information from those two systems, project developers will be able to prove cause and effect of marketing, they believe.
But VNU is in play, with a group of private equity firms having offered $9 billion to acquire it. If that happens, Nielsen Media Research might be broken off and sold, which casts some doubts on the future of the Apollo project, according to the article.
Another mixed signal in the Apollo affair is the fact that Nielsen passed on launching a joint media ratings venture with Arbitron based on the latter’s PPM technology. Nielsen said at the time that the decision would not affect the Apollo project, but executives familiar with the situation between Nielsen and Arbitron have said that Nielsen is being careful to differentiate its own ratings “currency” from a marketing research tool which, if deployed successfully, could cause marketers to question the long-term need for media ratings.
Vending machines filled with a “synthetic blood nourishment beverage” called Tru Blood have sold out - but vampire fans can get more of the bloody refreshment at events across the country promoting a new HBO drama.
The series True Blood,…
Total magazine rate-card-reported advertising revenue for the first half of 2008 closed at $11,554,569,406, down 3.1 percent compared with the first half of 2007, according to Publishers Information Bureau (PIB), Magazine Publishers of America reported (via MarketingCharts).
Ad pages during the first…
Internet coupons have become of increasing interest to consumers, with 11 percent of households now obtaining coupons via the internet - an increase of 83 percent since 2005 - according to (pdf) a recent analysis by Scarborough Research, reports MarketingCharts.
However, the…
AMC’s Mad Men snared 16 Emmy nominations, including best drama - the first time a basic cable series was nominated in the best-series category.
The show received the most nominations of all dramatic TV series. FX’s Damages also received a…
Vogue will follow the lives of three young women as they enter the world of top modeling, pulling video together for a web-based reality series called Model.Live. Clothing retailer Express LLC paid in the low seven figures to be the…
Antiperspirant manufacturer Mitchum is launching a promotion, kicked off in the Pacific Northwest this month, that offers consumers $1 coupons attached to hangers that come from dry cleaners.
This is the third time Mitchum has partnered with EcoHangers - a company…
