News notes
In November 2011, Vinod Gupta, founder and former CEO of Omaha, Neb., research company Infogroup Inc., filed a countersuit against Infogroup’s suit that charged Gupta with stealing confidential information to help grow his Database 101.com venture, also in Omaha. In the filing in the Douglas County District Court, Database said its business is substantially different from Infogroup’s, although it competes for some of the same customers. Database also said Infogroup employees spread false, damaging information about Database and its products to customers and Infogroup hired a key engineer away from Database and “compelled” him to provide secret information about Database’s operations. The suit said company officials suspect Infogroup employees of attacking its computers. Database asked the court for unspecified damages.
Consumer and privacy organizations Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Action, Consumer Watchdog and The Praxis Project filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, Washington, D.C., in October 2011, calling on the agency to investigate and bring an action against PepsiCo and its subsidiary Frito-Lay for “engaging in deceptive and unfair digital marketing practices in violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act.” The complaint focuses on a series of Frito-Lay’s online marketing campaigns that target teens through a variety of stealth interactive marketing and data collection techniques involving social media, immersive multimedia content, mobile phones and gaming platforms. The complaint cites materials from PepsiCo’s advertising partners to provide detailed documentation of the company’s strategies and tactics for targeting teens online to increase sales of its Doritos brand.
The Council of American Survey Research Organizations, Port Jefferson, N.Y., has released its Social Media Research Guidelines, which provide an ethical framework for research performed within the unique forums and behavior systems and the associate varied privacy expectations of the social media space.
Research companies All Global, London; M3 USA, Washington, D.C.; and Medefield, New York, have formed the Trust Alliance, a collaboration that seeks to advance industry standards, develop and promote best practices and foster trust in online physician research. Trust Alliance will address inherent challenges in online research through a number of discrete programs and initiatives, including authenticity, transparency and data integrity.
Acquisitions/transactions
Englewood, Colo., business information company IHS Inc. has acquired Purvin & Gertz Inc., a Houston market research company.
New York research company TNS has acquired all remaining shares in Orodek Badania Opinii Publicznej (TNS OBOP), a Warsaw, Poland, research company. This acquisition takes TNS’ stake in TNS OBOP from 60 percent to 100 percent.
McLean, Va., research company Clearspring has acquired XGraph Inc., a New York data science company. Clearspring will absorb XGraph’s audience technology to create a multigraph platform on the open Web, mapping users’ connections by brand affiliation, intent and social behavior.
Milwaukee research company Market Probe has acquired Richard Day Research Inc., Evanston, Ill.
Oxford, U.K., business consultancy LMC Automotive has acquired the automotive forecasting division from Westlake Village, Calif., research company J.D. Power and Associates.
Alliances/strategic partnerships
Reston, Va., research company comScore Inc. and Taipei, Taiwan, digital measurement company InsightXplorer have formed an exclusive third-party reseller alliance to bring comScore’s products and services to the Taiwan market.
Awards/rankings
The Marketing Research Council of the American Marketing Association, New York, has named Amanda Durkee of Zanthus; Martijn van Kesteren of Unilever Benelux; Pravin Shekar of Krea; and Orlando Wood of BrainJuicer Labs as recipients of the second annual 4 Under 40 Marketing Research Emerging Leaders Award. The award recognizes the contributions of the next generation of leaders in the marketing research industry.
Columbia, Md., research company Arbitron Inc. has recognized Beatriz R. Perez, chief sustainability officer of the Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, as its 2011 Arbitron Multicultural Marketing Honoree. Perez was selected for her commitment to multicultural marketing and for supporting radio as an effective means of reaching America’s diverse audiences.
Kristin Luck, president of Fresno, Calif., research company Decipher Inc., has been named as an Executive of the Year in Best in Biz Awards, a national business awards program judged by members of the press and industry analysts. Luck was honored for the leadership and direction she has provided in bringing market research technology solutions to market for her company.
Additionally, Decipher Inc. and Chicago research company InContext Solutions were both named to the 2011 Lead411 Tech 200 list by Lead411, a Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., business data and information company. Companies were selected and ranked based on revenue percentage growth from 2008 to 2010. Applicants had to be a privately-held business in the United States and have earned more than $1 million in the past year.
New York research company WorldOne’s Lithuania operation has been named Language Ambassador of Europe 2011 by the British Council in Lithuania and European Union National Institutes of Culture in Brussels, Belgium, in partnership with the British Chamber of Commerce, London. The award honors WorldOne Lithuania as a business enterprise that shows good policy of language learning and usage.
PepsiCo, Purchase, N.Y., and Portsmouth, N.H., research company Sentient Decision Science Inc. were named recipients of the EXPLOR Award, which recognizes breakthrough innovation in technology as applied to market research. The EXPLOR Award was presented at The Market Research Event (TMRE) in November 2011 and was founded by Encino, Calif., research company uSamp.
Also at TMRE, Stamford, Conn., research company InsightExpress received the 2011 Next Gen Market Research Disruptive Innovation Award for Most Innovative Deployment of a Research Concept for its development of the Ignite Network, a panel-based data analytics and research platform.
Finally, New York research company Ipsos Loyalty’s Tim Keiningham and Alex Buoye; Fordham University professor Lerzan Aksoy; and Vanderbilt University professor Bruce Cooil received the 2011 Next Gen Market Research Disruptive Innovation Award for developing the Wallet Allocation Rule, a research tool designed to help businesses better map out their share of consumer spending.
New accounts/projects
JIC STIR, an Amsterdam, Netherlands, Internet audience measurement company, has selected research companies Intomart GfK, Hilversum, Netherlands, and comScore Inc., Reston, Va., as the online media measurement currency in the Netherlands through 2014.
New Orleans research company Federated Sample has adopted San Francisco research company MarketTools Inc.’s TrueSample data quality solution for its Fulcrum project management platform.
European airline Alitalia has selected Olso, Norway, research software company Confirmit’s Horizons offering to create a customer panel for online customer experience surveys.
Kantar Video, a New York division of Fairfield, Conn., research company Kantar Group, has announced four new preferred partners for its Videolytics video analytics platform: Panache, Tube Mogul, Vindico and Kaltura.
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Washington, D.C., has selected Boston research company Crimson Hexagon’s ForSight platform.
London research company Effective Research has adopted the Kinesis Survey platform from Kinesis Survey Technologies LLC, Austin, Texas.
New companies/new divisions/relocations/expansions
Boston research company Crimson Hexagon has relocated its headquarters to offices Boston’s Seaport District.
California research company Crowd Science has relocated its Mountain View headquarters to Technology Drive in San Jose.
New York research company Millward Brown has opened an office in Munich, Germany. Anna Plöckl will lead the operation.
Boston research technology company Jana has opened an office in Singapore.
The Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau, Washington D.C., in partnership with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta; Georgia State University; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Emory University; the Georgia Institute of Technology; the University of Georgia; and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has opened a research data center laboratory in Atlanta. The center is located at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
Research company earnings/financial news
Rentrak Corporation, Portland, Ore., announced financial results for the second fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2011. Consolidated revenues were $21.9 million, compared with $24.1 million for second-quarter 2010.
IPerceptions Inc., Montreal, reported financial results for third-quarter 2011. Third-quarter revenue was $1.4 million, an increase of 16 percent over the same period in 2010, excluding the effect of foreign exchange. Operating loss was $(53,526) in the quarter, a 54 percent improvement over 2010.
National Research Corporation, Lincoln, Neb., announced results for the third quarter of 2011. Net new sales were $4.9 million and revenue rose 16 percent to $18.5 million. Net income increased 24 percent to $2.6 million.
Ipsos, Paris, reported financial results for the first nine months of 2011. Revenues totaled 845.8 million euros, an increase of 4.1 percent over the previous-year period. Organic growth rose 6 percent. In the third quarter alone, Ipsos’ revenues totaled 287.6 million euros, up 1.4 percent over 2010. Revenues rose by 5.4 percent at constant scope and exchange rates, compared with 6.2 percent in the first quarter and 6.4 percent in the second.
The Nielsen Company, New York, reported third-quarter 2011 results. Revenues for the third quarter increased 10 percent to $1,413 million over third-quarter 2010.
Kadence Singapore, a division of Kadence International, Framingham, Mass., reported a year-over-year revenue increase of 33 percent for its July-to-September 2011 period.
The GfK Group, Nuremberg, Germany, reported earnings for the first nine months of 2011. GfK increased sales by 7.1 percent to 999 million euros.