NielsenIQ Deepens Its Retail Intelligence: The 2022 CRM Conversation Starters
Chicago-based NielsenIQ is a global information services company providing some of the most complete and trusted data on consumers and markets in 90 countries, covering 90 percent of the world’s population. Its main focus is on the consumer packaged goods industry, but it has slowly been expanding into other retail sectors.
Over the past year, NielsenIQ has been investing both organically and inorganically to expand its coverage and to bring to market advanced technologies, including predictive analytics, to give its retail clients a more complete understanding of their customers.
A big part of the company’s recent growth initiatives has been robust activity on the mergers and acquisitions front. In just the past year alone, the company acquired GfK, covering the technologies and durables market, and CGA, covering the on- and off-premises alcohol markets.
NielsenIQ has also sought to increase its technology offerings, particularly in the retail and e-commerce sectors. Strategic acquisitions have been a key part of that strategy as well. It was able to add a retail artificial intelligence and loyalty platform through a deal involving ciValue. It also acquired Foxintelligence, Data Impact, and Rakuten Intelligence to advance its e-commerce and omnichannel measurement capabilities.
NielsenIQ also found itself on the receiving end of the acquisition spigot in mid-2021 when it was acquired by private equity firm Advent International for $2.7 billion. Former parent company Nielsen Holdings split its two core businesses—media measurement and its shopping and retail data business—into two distinct publicly traded companies and sold the latter just days after changing its name from Nielsen Global Connect to NielsenIQ.
Beyond acquisitions, NielsenIQ was also active on the partnership front, inking deals with Fetch Rewards to expand its Omnishopper panel with mobile consumer rewards data and with Qualtrics to offer companies deeper insight into brand health.
Organic product development was also a priority for NielsenIQ, which in May launched Activate, a retail media solution that allows retailers to leverage their own data to accelerate new revenue streams by activating shoppers with personalized promotional offers.
NielsenIQ Activate, which leverages technologies the company gained in its ciValue acquisition and the 2020 acquisition of merchandising and analytics solutions provider Precima, is comprised of dedicated applications for hyper-targeted audience building, offer and ads management, and end-to-end measurement across all channels. With it, retailers will be able to build personas and precise audiences across thousands of customer attributes; gain out-of-the-box customer-centric omnichannel insights; decrease the time to launch and measure personalized customer engagements in real time across owned and external media; and align with brands on customer needs to maximize data and media monetization.
NielsenIQ also launched Omnisales, providing retailers and suppliers with a single source of information for online and offline sales, including in-store and curbside pick-up.
Omnisales integrates and harmonizes NielsenIQ’s data assets across point-of-sale (POS) retail measurement data, e-commerce sales data, and client sources to produce its insights.
The company has also undergone an executive leadership makeover, with James Peck, a former CEO of TransUnion, now at the helm, and a vast array of other C-suite and executive appointments. Now a stand-alone private company under Advent, it is better positioned to accelerate its transformation and strengthen its market-leading position, many analysts have said.