IPG Mediabrands has announced a partnership with Nielsen that will let the agency network better evaluate communications plans against the measurement and analytics giant’s TV audience and consumer insights before committing to spend.

The integration lets IPG Mediabrands agency staff cross-reference identity graphs housed within its Audience Management Platform (AMP) with Nielsen’s extensive TV viewing and consumer purchase data made available through Nielsen Catalina Solutions.

It also lets IPG staff access Nielsen Marketing Cloud and Nielsen Media Impact tools so they can better estimate the impact of their plans when it comes to key metrics such as audience reach, and brand equity before they commit to media buys.

Arun Kumar, IPG Mediabrands, global chief data and marketing technology officer, said the partnership would equip its media planners to reach addressable audiences at scale.

Damian Garbaccio, Nielsen, executive vice president, added: “This speaks to our ability to customize our unique data assets and software to meet the exact business needs of our agency and brand clients.”

The technology relationship comes on the heels of a new five-year global services agreement between Nielsen and IPG Mediabrands. This includes Nielsen solutions for Local and National TV, Audio, Scarborough, Digital Content Ratings (DCR), SVOD Content Ratings and cross-platform planning licensing. Additionally, it provides the first-ever enterprise-wide Nielsen Buyer Insights license.

IPG Mediabrands suite of media agencies boasts a client roster including leading CPG brands such as Coca-Cola plus Johnson & Johnson, among others – the likes of which have historically relied heavily on TV ad spend to implement their marketing communications strategies.

However, TV ad spend is on the wane as regards to overall share or media spend, with digital ad expenditures surpassing it for the first time in 2016, according to eMarketer figures, and ad spend on mobile devices expected to surpass TV budgets by 2019. As ad dollars are further allocated to digital, TV’s share of total spend is forecast to decline from 35.2% in 2017 to 30.8% by 2021.

In part, this is the result of more-and-more corporations moving towards the application of zero-based budgeting techniques meaning many marketers are now under pressure to prove a return-on-investment for their media budgeting, and media agencies subsequently have to justify how they spend clients’ budgets.

Nielsen Catalina Solutions aims to help advertisers better attribute their media spend to resulting consumer purchases by correlating TV ad exposure to in-store purchase behavior by verifying it against credit card transaction data.

Earlier this year it launched a new industry research study aimed at understanding the best strategy for building CPG brands through better understanding the importance of each piece of the media mix in a brand’s success.

The following advertisers, media companies, and institutions have signed on to participate in this project:

Advertisers: Anheuser-Busch; The Hershey Company; Kellogg; L’Oreal USA; Mars; Mondelēz International; Nestle Purina; Reynolds Consumer Products, and more
Media companies: CBS Corporation; Facebook; NBCUniversal; Pinterest; Turner
Organizations: Advertising Research Foundation; The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute; Longman-Moran Analytics
The initial findings of this multi-phased research will be presented in spring of 2018, a date which is likely to coincide with this year's Upfronts.