Nielsen announced today that it’s acquiring ad tech company Vizu.
This isn’t the kind of deal where you have to wait months for something to happen. Executive Vice President for Ad Effectiveness Scott McKinley says it’s a “plug and play acquisition,” and in fact, Vizu’s Ad Catalyst will be available immediately as part of Nielsen’s online ad measurement tools.
When the company decided to improve its ability to measure online ad effectiveness, McKinley says Vizu was the obvious choice, since it’s the leader in the field. Vizu’s technology shows brief polls to people who have seen an ad, and others who haven’t — so advertisers can use the polls to determine whether campaigns seem to improve people’s perception of their company. McKinley says one of Vizu’s big draws is the fact that it provides advertisers with real-time data, so that they can tweak campaigns based on the results.
Eventually, Nielsen will do more to integrate Vizu’s features with its measurement of online ad reach, and with its cross-platform products. The goal, McKinley says, is “bringing data out of Vizu systems and connecting up with how we measure television, so we can offer advertisers a complete picture of reach and effectiveness across television and online.”
Vizu raised more than $10 million in funding from investors including Ron Conway, Esther Dyson, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, iNovia Capital, and Greycroft Partners. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but McKinley says the Vizu team will be joining Nielsen, and that it will continue working out of its San Francisco offices.
Nielsen is a leading global provider of information and insights into what consumers watch and buy. Nielsen is a information and measurement company with leading market positions in marketing and consumer information, television and other media measurement, online intelligence, mobile measurement, trade shows and related properties. Nielsen has a presence in approximately 100 countries, with headquarters in New York, USA and Diemen, the Netherlands.
Vizu Corporation provides the first real-time, enterprise technology platform that allows advertisers and their partners in the digital media ecosystem to collaborate around optimizing Brand Lift metrics, moving their target audience through the purchase funnel from building awareness to creating intent and preference. The Vizu Brand Advertising Effectiveness platform supports the real-time measurement and optimization of all key processes in the advertising lifecycle, from audience profiling to campaign measurement, and includes solutions that can be used stand-alone or in...
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
