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Tim
Callahan
President
ACNielsen North America
“And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”
-William Shakespeare
The summer season, for many of us, seems to wind down before it even starts. The traditional time of family vacations, picnics and travel is also the time for many of us to assess our mid-year business performance and look ahead to the second half and beyond. This summer, we at ACNielsen and VNU have been extremely busy. We recently launched our strategic plan for VNU Marketing Information, which includes ACNielsen as well as Spectra, TDLinx and BASES. VNU also announced a merger with market leader IMS Health. And we are continually working to find new and innovative ways to deliver consumer insights faster and more efficiently.
The VNU Vision
The VNU strategic plan was first previewed in April at our Consumer 360 conference. Our vision, and that of our parent company, is to be recognized as the global authority on consumer behavior and marketing effectiveness. Our global reach in over 100 countries and our coverage of your markets—through investments
and expansion of our household panels and emerging channels—make us uniquely
positioned to reach for this goal. But to succeed, we must always have the business needs of our clients top of mind.
We are truly excited, as part of the VNU family, about the opportunity we have
to improve how the industry operates and to drive our clients’ growth. And we’ve demonstrated those capabilities daily, by delivering business-critical information
to them. However, it is not enough to focus on technological improvements to help
the industry. Our responsibility has always been to continue to learn and understand our clients and their needs, and to invest in business solutions that help them
understand their consumers, markets and marketing efforts.
Our Approach
Client issues drive our business, and we have built our strategic plan by aligning with the way our clients manage their businesses. There are eight key areas of focus that we will use as a framework in understanding your issues and helping you solve them:
- Foresight and Trends: Seeing future opportunities, stimulating growth strategies
- Portfolio and Positioning: Optimizing product portfolios, brand positioning
- Innovation: Improving the odds of new product success
- Consumer Segmentation and Targeting: Identifying and reaching the most valuable
consumer groups
- Marketing ROI: Improving sales and marketing productivity
- Retail Distribution and Execution: Optimizing product reach and in-store programs
- Brand Health: Enhancing brand value in the marketplace
- Performance Tracking and Evaluation: Guiding
day-to-day business tactics
We have already begun work in many of these areas to align and develop new services to meet your needs. Projects like Apollo, which aligns consumer brand recognition and media exposure to store traffic and purchases, are gaining traction in the market. The development of DecisionSMART has helped improve ROI for marketers and their brands. New retailer services like Front of Store and Retail ACView drive foresight and trends throughout the trade. And we have added significant strength by merging with IMS Health.
A New Partner
As you have probably heard, VNU has made the significant decision to merge with IMS Health, the world’s leading provider of market intelligence and analytical insights to the global pharmaceutical and healthcare industry. The combined company will have unmatched capabilities in market intelligence and analytics in three major sectors of the world economy: consumer packaged goods, healthcare, and media and entertainment. This strategic transaction creates a global leader in market intelligence, dramatically enhancing the value each company is able to deliver to our clients.
What is most exciting is that this combination will enable us to do an even better job of helping you, our clients, maximize your business performance and meet financial goals. Although IMS Health is focused on the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, the core strengths of each company can be used to benefit the other’s clients. Operationally, we will have new critical mass in a number of key areas:
- In data collection, we will be able to combine investments in consumer panels, retailer services and RFID processing.
- In processing, we will have the combined capacity to develop industry-leading methods of data integration and business intelligence.
- In information dissemination, our increased scale will aid development of innovative services and new modes of electronic delivery.
VNU will benefit from IMS’s proficiency in consulting, new product development and sales force maximization services, while IMS’s clients will have access to the most extensive intelligence about media influences on patient and
prescriber behaviors. Also, by bringing together IMS’s
prescription and over-the-counter pharmacy information with VNU’s mass market OTC data, we will be able to provide a
comprehensive “therapeutic class” view and richer insights into the entire healthcare marketplace.
In addition, our VNU consumer panels will provide insight on prescription trends
identified with IMS data. VNU’s extensive consumer
and social data also will enable pharmaceutical companies to target promotional programs by demographics.
What Is In It For You
This merger will enable us to better address the three
critical trends influencing our clients’ businesses:
- Consumer complexity: the diversity of choices at their
disposal and their increasing control over buying, media and healthcare decisions.
- Deeper insight: the need of senior managers for more
penetrating market insight and intelligence that makes
a real contribution to ROI.
- Globalization: the demand for scale and depth in data collection and analysis, resulting in greater consistency
in global reporting and more support for expansion opportunities.
The clients I have spoken with are happy to see that our strategy continues to move us ahead and in the same direction they are headed. In the short term, it will bring continued focus on core issues—delivering relevant, timely information that you can use to grow your business. For the longer term, we have an even greater opportunity… a truly integrated and streamlined view of your business to help you perform more efficiently in the marketplace and focus on growing your revenue. We’ve taken many steps along the path, and there are many more to come. If you haven’t done so recently, please talk to your ACNielsen representative to see the many different ways we’re helping our clients achieve their goals.
May you all enjoy the remainder of the summer, and may you also have a successful second half.
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