The $48-a-share offer is 26 percent higher than Arbitron’s
closing price Monday. Excluding acquisition costs, the purchase will add about
13 cents to earnings per share in the year after it’s completed, Nielsen said
Tuesday in a statement. The New York-based company is financing the entire
transaction.
Bloomberg is reporting if it passes regulatory hurdles, the
deal will extend Nielsen’s dominance in television to radio. The company wants
to offer its advertisers a unified system that measures audiences across
multiple forms of media, making it easier for them to make ad-buying decisions
-- whether on TV, radio or the Web. The move follows a partnership with Twitter
Inc. Monday that will monitor discussions of TV shows on the social network.
“We want to cover as much of the media landscape as possible
and be helpful to our clients in that way,” said Steve Hasker, Nielsen’s
president of global media products, who will oversee Arbitron after the merger.
Marketers are looking for simpler ways to compare their ad spending across
media, he said. As part of that effort, Nielsen plans to start measuring
popular digital radio services such as Pandora Media Inc. after the acquisition, according to Hasker.
That should be good news for Pandora, which has maintained
that for it to be competitive with traditional radio broadcast in the fight for
advertising dollars, it needs to be ranked equally with them by services like
Arbitron.
The deal still faces antitrust scrutiny from the U.S.
Federal Trade Commission, said Rich Tullo, an analyst at Albert Fried & Co.
in New York. Nielsen controls more than 80 percent of the TV-rating industry,
while Arbitron has more than 90 percent of the market for terrestrial-radio
ratings, he said.
“It’s a monopoly in radio and a monopoly in TV -- the FTC is
going to want to understand the transaction,” Tullo said in an interview.
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