Nielsen acquires Visual IQ to bolster attribution capabilities
Data measurement company Nielsen is looking to improve its utility to advertisers by announcing the acquisition of Visual IQ, a marketing intelligence company that specializes in multi-touch attribution (MTA) with the transaction set to conclude by October.
Nielsen should now have a better understanding of audiences
The deal was announced Wednesday 27 September, with Nielsen claiming it will now be able to more effectively process large data sets as Visual IQ's software platform will provide it with access to more proprietary big data from advertisers, publishers and retailers.
Matt Krepsik, global head of product leadership for marketing ROI at Nielsen, said the acquisition will power the company’s capabilities in the marketing effectiveness space, adding that it will bring “speed and granularity at scale to ROI measurement”.
He added: "Visual IQ's rich history of marketing attribution and digital intelligence combined with Nielsen's gold-standard marketing effectiveness solutions will provide advertisers, publishers and agencies with a holistic platform that offers the transparency to optimize and improve the return on marketing investments."
Manu Mathew, co-founder and chief executive at Visual IQ, said that the company’s MTA technology drives marketing effectiveness, and added that the acquisition will provide increased value to clients plus a more powerful combined solution to the industry as a whole.
The transaction follows Nielsen's August purchase of vBrand, a startup with a machine-learning-enabled platform that measures brand exposure in sports programming, and comes as advertisers increasingly look to establish MTA strategies in order to better assess the effectiveness of their media spend.
It also comes during a period of mergers and acquisitions in the space, just days ago programmatic advertising company OpenX made the dual acquisition of Mezzobit and PubNation; two companies that will bolster its tag management and real-time monitoring capabilities respectively.