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22 August 2005
New York, NY
Nielsen Sports and ACNielsen, units of VNU, today announced that the National Football League has become the first client of FANLinks™, a new service linking the interests of sports fans with their shopping and purchasing behavior.
FANLinks makes use of the ACNielsen Homescan® consumer panel to identify households by their interest in any of ten professional sports. That information is used in conjunction with household shopping and purchasing behavior, recorded by Homescan panelists via patented handheld UPC-code scanners. All 91,500 households – growing to 125,000 by October, 2005 – are equipped with such scanners.
“By providing a transaction-based ability to profile our fans' brand and category usage, FanLinks will put us in an even better position to help our partners optimize their overall sports marketing strategies,” said Cary Meyers, vice president of research, NFL.
“FANLinks will enable advertisers to maximize their investment in sports marketing and help leagues more effectively market their incredibly powerful brands and products – both on the field and off the field," said Ron Schneier, general manager, Nielsen Ventures. “This new service will significantly improve both planning and post analysis of sports sponsorships.”
“This is a further example of the consumer insight capability VNU has been building towards. Understanding the interests of consumers and how those interests either influence what the consumer buys or what marketers need to do to reach them is consistent with that goal,” said Robert Tomei, president, ACNielsen Global Consumer Panel Services. “The combination of VNU's tremendous media and marketing information assets provides FANLinks subscribers an insider’s view of today’s sports fan – their interest in and behavior toward professional sports and how it translates to purchasing behavior.”
With FANLinks, marketers will be able to learn what product categories and brands are purchased by fans of specific sports and where they shop – by retail channel and specific retailer. These new insights could be used for improved target marketing.
Nielsen Sports and ACNielsen Homescan will be conducting research through a Homescan sub-panel of sport’s fans’ homes in the near future. Results are scheduled to be available later this year.
About Nielsen Sports
Nielsen Sports, a unit of VNU, launched in July 2004 and has clients spread out over multiple sports including motor sports, baseball, golf, basketball, tennis, and football. The service was developed in collaboration with Nielsen Ventures whose mission is to develop innovative new marketing services for the media and entertainment industry. VNU is a global information and media company with leading market positions and recognized brands in marketing information (ACNielsen), media measurement and information (Nielsen Media Research) and business information (Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, Computing, Intermediair). VNU is active in more than 100 countries, with headquarters in Haarlem, the Netherlands and New York, USA. The company employs 38,000 people. Total revenues under IFRS amounted to EUR 3.3 billion in 2004. VNU is listed on the Euronext Amsterdam (ASE: VNU) stock exchange.
For more information, please visit the VNU website at: http://www.vnu.com.
For more information on Nielsen Sports please visit: http://www.nielsensports.com.
About ACNielsen
ACNielsen, a VNU business, is the world’s leading marketing information provider. Offering services in more than 100 countries, the unit provides measurement and analysis of marketplace dynamics and consumer attitudes and behavior. Clients rely on ACNielsen’s market research, proprietary products, analytical tools and professional service to understand competitive performance, to uncover new opportunities and to raise the profitability of their marketing and sales campaigns.
For more information please visit: http://www.acnielsen.com.
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