Nielsen Launches Audience Planner Solution

Nielsen today launched Nielsen Audience Planner, an always-on solution that enables first-party audience segments to efficiently flow across systems to serve the various stages of the media planning and buying process. The new product offers marketers the opportunity to reach their most important consumers by performing blind-matches between their first-party data and Nielsen's world-class panel data with speed and ease, delivering Nielsen's viewing information in an efficient and relevant manner.

Over the past decade, the media industry has demanded increased flexibility and tools that enable the use of trusted first- and third-party data to be leveraged across all stages of an advertising campaign. For data-driven linear campaigns, the creation of first-party audience segments that leverage Nielsen's widely-used, gold-standard measurement data with representative viewing behaviors for media planning is more important than ever. Nielsen Audience Planner ensures consistency, efficiency and ease for the creation of advanced audiences and provides advertisers with the same level of confidence for planning data-driven linear deals as they have with traditional age and gender buys. The product also allows agencies, marketers and publishers to create media plans focused on strategic, action-oriented consumers to drive return on ad spend, improve efficiency and eliminate waste.

"Our clients have invested a tremendous amount of capital into their proprietary first-party audience stacks and we want to reduce the friction by allowing effortless planning with such key consumer segments," said Jay Nielsen, Senior Vice President, Global Media Planning Product, Nielsen. "The idea behind Nielsen Audience Planner is to enable a quicker, more efficient flow of first-party data, while really putting the user experience back into the client's hands."

Audience Planner is dynamic by design, allowing users to leverage specific product capabilities after a one-time set up. It maximizes the utility of first party data, eliminates redundancies and saves time. At launch, the solution will feature the first-party data upload, access to the new segments in Nielsen Media Impact (NMI) and segment export capabilities including:

• First-Party Data Upload: Users can upload first-party audience data and match it to Nielsen's audience measurement data, resulting in the creation of unlimited audience profiles on-the-fly.
• Plan in NMI: For NMI subscribers, once new segments are created, they will be automatically available for tactical media planning.
• Segment Export: Newly created segments can flow seamlessly across multiple systems and workflows including in-house, third-party or Nielsen solutions for further analysis or data-driven linear deals.

In the future, Nielsen will look to incorporate features to enhance the client workflow; for example, a storyfinder feature which will offer users the ability to identify and visualize media stories for the custom segments.