News notes
Feb. 1 marked the beginning of the 46th year that Mid-Iowa Interviewing Inc., a focus facility and field service firm located in Des Moines, Iowa, has been in operation.
Disney was ranked the most intimate brand among Millennials, according to the Brand Intimacy 2017 Report by New York brand intimacy agency MBLM. Brand intimacy is defined as a paradigm that leverages and strengthens the emotional bonds between a person and a brand. Following Disney, Amazon and Netflix ranked as the second- and third-most intimate brands for Millennials. In MBLM’s 2015 report, Amazon placed first, followed by Apple and PlayStation.
Jeff Anderson Consulting/AH! Advertising, a La Quinta, Calif., research and advertising firm, celebrated its 30-year anniversary on Feb. 1.
Acquisitions/transactions
Private equity firm Thoma Bravo has completed the sale of its portfolio company, Herndon, Va., enterprise software firm Deltek, to Roper Technologies for $2.8 billion.
Nielsen, New York, has purchased London-based company VisualDNA for an undisclosed sum to further its marketing cloud efforts. VisualDNA is an audience data business that supplies data to brands, agencies and publishers. The data is based on results of a psychographic personality test that has been taken by over 40 million people.
New York-based digital agency Wunderman has acquired a majority stake in Pmweb Comunicação Ltda., a digital marketing firm based in Brazil. Under the leadership of CEO Tárik Potthoff, Pmweb will continue to operate independently as part of the Wunderman network.
Stamford, Conn., researcher Gartner Inc. has entered into an agreement to acquire all outstanding shares of Arlington, Va., technology company CEB in a cash and stock transaction valued at approximately $2.6 billion.
Investment firm the Carlyle Group, in partnership with the Indian Hill Group, has acquired consumer segmentation firm Claritas from Nielsen. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Canada-based CRC Research has acquired Research House, a Toronto-based research agency specializing in focus group facilities and qualitative recruiting. The acquisition creates a qualitative specialty research company in Canada with offices and facilities in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
Port Washington, N.Y., researcher The NPD Group has acquired Nielsen’s U.S. market information and research services for the book industry. The acquisition includes U.S.-based BookScan; PubTrack Digital; PubTrack Higher Education; PubTrack Christian; Books & Consumers; PubEasy; and PubNet. These services will be part of NPD Book, a new U.S. practice area. NPD will offer sales tracking for physical and digital books as well as buyer demographics and insights into print and digital preferences and trends. Nielsen will continue to own and operate Nielsen Book outside of the U.S.
Private equity fund Stagwell Media LLC has acquired certain custom research assets from New York-based Nielsen, including the Harris brand and the Harris Poll. Harris will relaunch as Harris Insights & Analytics, while the Harris Poll brand will remain unchanged. As part of Stagwell, Harris will focus on brand management, corporate reputation, consumer packaged goods, public opinion and consumer experience research. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Reimagine Holdings Group, a holding company focused on consumer insights and marketing services companies, has acquired Newton, Mass., research software solutions company MarketSight.
San Francisco-based loyalty marketplace Ebates has acquired Lexington, Mass., loyalty marketing solutions company Cartera Commerce.
Technology company Cisco, San Jose, Calif., has reported its intent to acquire San Francisco-based application intelligence firm AppDynamics Inc. for approximately $3.7 billion. AppDynamics will continue to be a led by CEO David Wadhwani as a new software business unit in Cisco’s IoT and applications business.
E-mail data solutions firm Return Path, New York, has acquired Louisville, Colo., e-mail data company ThreatWave.
Alliances/strategic partnerships
San Diego-based MediKeeper Inc. has reached an agreement with data warehouse service provider Human Factor Analytics, Russellville, Ark., to resell its platform and develop more detailed analytics about employee behavior and health risks that administrators can use to better manage employee benefits. As a MediKeeper client, Human Factor Analytics will resell MediKeeper’s platform to its client base, which includes benefits brokers, employees and risk managers.
Nielsen, New York, and Tokyo-based Video Research Ltd have established a business partnership to create a standard and common digital audience measurement service for the Japan market. The partnership will measure the reach of content and advertising across Japan via PC and mobile devices to strengthen Internet audience measurement indices and advertising effectiveness services.
U.K. video insight firm Voxpopme has partnered with Affectiva, a Waltham, Mass.-based emotion recognition software company. Affectiva’s Emotion AI will be integrated into Voxpopme’s platform to enable the analysis of facial expressions within video feedback, coding it into emotion data. The integration allows researchers using Voxpopme’s video insight platform to accurately measure and quantify human expressions of emotion in new and existing video feedback. Separately, Voxpopme has partnered with Warren, N.J., researcher Lightspeed to launch Video Answers in the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa. Video Answers allows clients to capture and analyze video open-ends at-scale and in real-time for survey research.
Japan-based panel and survey software firm dataSpring has expanded its U.K. and Thailand panels through a partnership with an unnamed market research firm. The partnership adds to dataSpring’s existing coverage of panelists in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore.
Chicago-based researcher IRI has entered into a long-term strategic relationship with Canada-based food retailer Sobeys Inc. Sobeys will use the IRI Liquid Data technology and its Unify visualization platform to integrate and report transaction, loyalty card, promotional and other data sources through a single platform across all of its retail food formats.
Nielsen, New York, has expanded its Connected Partner Program to include retail-focused companies such as 1010data, ciValue, Neogrid, Clear Demand and RangeMe.
Canada-based online data collection company AskingCanadians has partnered with student and youth network yconic to provide access to the organization’s youth-focused consumer insights panel.
India-based researcher MRSS India has partnered with the Effie India 2016 awards. The awards, organized by The Advertising Club, honor effective marketing communications across India. MRSS India was asked to be the analytics partner and gain insight into the judges’ views.
Merchandising and marketing solutions firm OSI Creative and point-of-purchase display firm RP Creative Display, both located in Irvine, Calif., have joined forces.
Boston-based social media analysis software firm Crimson Hexagon has integrated with business optimization platform Domo, allowing enterprises to analyze social media data alongside other business data, including sales data, financials, Web site analytics and more.
Salt Lake City-based customer experience software firm MaritzCX and Waban, Mass., research firm Temkin Group have formed a partnership to provide Temkin Group’s Temkin Ratings within the MaritzCX Platform. Through the partnership, MaritzCX customers will have access to survey templates and be able to compare their Temkin Ratings index score against other companies.
Little Rock, Ark., technology company Acxiom has entered into a strategic partnership with New York-based mobile marketing firm Verve, allowing agencies and marketers to better reach consumers across mobile devices.
Nielsen, New York, has entered into a multi-year agreement with Dallas-based AT&T to include anonymized set-top box data from connected homes that subscribe to AT&T’s DIRECTV and U-Verse services into Nielsen’s local and national TV currency ratings services. The data from the AT&T set-top boxes, integrated with Nielsen’s panels, will provide measurement that allows for a greater understanding of audiences and their viewing trends.
Atlanta-based e-mail marketing agency BrightWave and interaction management platform Bluecore have formed a partnership agreement to deliver products and services to retail marketing organizations. BrightWave will leverage Bluecore’s platform to better use customer data across its client roster and will provide strategic, creative, campaign and technology services for Bluecore customers.
New York-based customer data platform mParticle has partnered with Reston, Va., firm comScore, allowing publisher clients to use comScore’s audience and advertising measurement solutions through the mParticle platform.
Association/organization news
In Washington, D.C., the Insights Association, a research and analytics organization created from the merger of CASRO and MRA, has launched. MRA and CASRO staff will continue with the new organization and are joined by recent hires Krista Vazquez and Jonathan Saxe. David W. Almy, who served as MRA CEO since 2010, will be CEO of the new association and Simon Chadwick, managing partner of Cambiar, will be chair of the association’s board. CASRO President Diane Bowers will continue to work with the association on key projects.
Awards/rankings
Canada-based research and strategic marketing firm CreativeWorks Marketing has won Gold in the 2016 MarCom Awards, which recognizes creativity and excellence in the marketing and communications fields.
The MicroTracker solution by Boston-based market intelligence firm InCrowd has won the Best of Show Award as the Best Technological Innovation of 2016 from the Fierce Innovation Awards: Life Sciences Edition Program.
MRIA fellow Michael Adams has been awarded the Order of Canada for his commitment to public service and contributions to the market research community.
New companies/new divisions/relocations/expansions
E-commerce intelligence firm Clavis Insight, based in Dublin, reported that it has doubled revenue, its team and the number of brands it serves in 2016. The company has expanded its operations in Dublin, London, Paris and Boston and has invested in the Asia-Pacific region with a growing team in Shanghai. Additionally, Clavis now serves customers in consumer electronics, cosmetics, consumer packaged and luxury goods in more than 30 e-commerce markets.
Los Angeles online community platform Passenger has changed its company name to FUEL CYCLE.
Health care and life sciences advisory firm CMC Consulting Group, Boston, has rebranded as Alira Health as a result of the company’s expansion in the health care space.a
Kantar Worldpanel, based in the U.K., has extended its specialist panels measuring the out-of-home purchase and consumption of food and beverages to France, Brazil, Mexico and Thailand, taking its total read of the global out-of-home markets to 10 countries.
U.K.-based translation services firm Language Connect has expanded its U.S. operations with additional in-country staff. The expansion will be spearheaded by Mickey Brooks, who has joined the firm as senior vice president of sales for North America.
Health care data collection firm SHC Universal, New York, has reported a 15 percent increase in its panel site in the past year.
San Francisco-based software company Salesforce has opened a new office in Bellevue, Wash., which will house one of its engineering and innovation hubs. In the coming months, the company plans to double its workforce in Bellevue to nearly 500.
Following an investment from its parent company Cello PLC, U.K. audience intelligence platform Pulsar has merged with its sister company, qualitative research agency FACE, under one brand.
Lightspeed All Global has relaunched as Lightspeed Health, a practice of Warren, N.J., researcher Lightspeed, and includes a new logo and Web site. Jennifer Carrea, CEO, was appointed to lead Lightspeed’s global health care practice in Sept. 2016.
Research company earnings/financial news
Chicago-based data science software and services firm Civis Analytics has raised $22 million in Series A funding led by Drive Capital, with participation from Verizon Ventures, WPP and Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. As part of the round of funding, Chris Olsen has joined Dan Wagner, Eric Schmidt and Tim O’Reilly on the firm’s board of directors.