Nielsen CEO: ‘Radio Is..Vibrant Medium’

Nielsen Holdings N.V.'s third-quarter profit rose 28% as the consumer-research company's two main segments posted stronger revenue.

Nielsen provides data ranging from what people watch on television to what they buy in stores. The company's profits have generally improved, as growth in emerging markets helped demand for its data and analysis on what consumers buy and watch.

For the latest quarter, Nielsen reported a profit of $134 million, or 35 cents a share, up from $105 million, or 29 cents a share, a year earlier. Stripping out stock-based compensation and other items, per-share earnings rose to 50 cents from 44 cents.

Revenue grew 2.7% to $1.39 billion.

Asked about potential revenue opportunities with the integration of Arbitron at Nielsen, CEO David L. Calhoun said integration is going smoothly telling Wednesday’s conference call  that “when we started the integration of our company back in '07, we have been integrating companies literally since Day 1, so we're pretty schooled at it. So on Day 1 at Arbitron, we have a plan, literally by function and by operation, a plan for really almost complete integration with the Nielsen company.”

David Calhoun

He added, “the headquarters stuff is easy, because you don't need 2 headquarters. The functional support stuff is relatively straightforward, because you only need one accounts payable processing. You only need one receivables. The fit with this company, I've said this many times, is really relative to the 35 we did before this, is probably better than any of those. And so we're just going to march down that path. And like I said, I'm confident that we can express big synergies quickly, because I know that path and we're on it. I don't think I need to get a whole lot more specific than that. We dealt with the brand issue right out of the chute, so everyone knows it's Nielsen Audio. We have had real good support out of the marketplace for that move. And then on the revenue side, I think our client base, what they want more than anything from Nielsen is they want to marry their audience measurement with retail data so that they can begin to go to the marketplace and demonstrate the effectiveness of the medium against all other mediums.”

Calhoun also said Nielsen believes that radio is a more vibrant medium than the way the world perceives it. 

“And it's mostly built around its local characteristics and its proximity to everything retail. So it actually is, it's 2 hours of a consumer's day. Most of it's in a car, and most of it is in close proximity to retail. And so of all the mediums that should benefit from that, this one should be significant. So our job is to go out and demonstrate with what kind of retailers, with what kind of consumers does it, in fact, have an impact and then can we begin to educate advertisers as to what that impact is so that they can include it in their media mix models and other forms of resource allocation models that they do,” according to Calhoun.