News notes
Los Angeles nonprofit Women in Research (WIRe) held its first WIRexec Retreat in Sausalito, Calif., on May 12 and 13. Presenters covered topics such as business strategy, leadership and empowerment and practical issues such as securing funding for growth.
Acquisitions/transactions
Jersey City, N.J., data analytics provider Verisk Analytics Inc. and New York private equity firm Veritas Capital have signed a definitive agreement under which an affiliate of Veritas Capital has agreed to acquire Verisk’s health care services business, Verisk Health, for $820 million. The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. Upon closing, Verisk Health will be renamed and will operate as an independent company at its current headquarters in Waltham, Mass.
U.K.-based customer science company dunnhumby has taken an equity stake in Aptaris, a Tampa, Fla., marketing enterprise management software and services firm. The investment follows the announcement of a strategic partnership agreement in January between the two firms to integrate their complementary software solutions.
San Jose, Calif., firm Adobe has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Livefyre, a San Francisco-based content curation and audience engagement company. Livefyre will be part of Adobe Experience Manager and integrated across Adobe Marketing Cloud to make user-generated content available across all eight digital marketing solutions.
Information and technology services company IMS Health and product development and integrated health care services firm Quintiles have been approved for a definitive merger agreement by their respective boards of directors where the companies will be combined in an all-stock merger of equals transaction. The merged company will be named Quintiles IMS Holdings Inc. The combined company expects to maintain dual headquarters in Danbury, Conn., and Research Triangle Park, N.C. Ari Bousbib, chairman and CEO of IMS Health, will become chairman and CEO of the merged company. Tom Pike, CEO of Quintiles, will become vice chairman. The company’s board of directors will be comprised of six directors appointed by the Quintiles board of directors and six directors appointed by the IMS Health board of directors. The lead director will be Dennis Gillings. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals and approval by both IMS Health and Quintiles shareholders and is expected to close in the second half of 2016.
Dallas-based brand experience company Freeman has acquired Exhibit Surveys, a research and consulting firm. Exhibit Surveys and its employees will continue to work from their offices in Red Bank, N.J. The company will retain the Exhibit Surveys brand in the marketplace for the immediate future and operate under FreemanXP, Freeman’s brand experience agency.
EBay, San Jose, Calif., has agreed to acquire Sweden-based machine learning and big data analytics firm Expertmaker, which has been a partner of eBay’s since 2010, most recently helping with eBay’s structured data initiative. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Upon the close of the transaction, Expertmaker’s employees will join eBay’s structured data product and technology team. Lars Hard, Expertmaker’s founder and CEO, will join as director, data science.
London-based media group Dentsu Aegis Network has acquired Shanghai VeryStar Internet Science and Technology Co. Ltd., a mobile and online retail commerce agency in China. VeryStar will become part of Dentsu Aegis Network’s digital agency Isobar China and will be known as VeryStar - Linked by Isobar. Milan Jiang, founder and CEO of VeryStar, will continue to lead the newly-formed company.
Washington, D.C., marketing analytics firm TrackMaven has acquired San Francisco-based attribution analytics platform 10Stories. The company also announced a new joint product, TrackMaven Attribution, which allows customers to track the impact of their marketing throughout the entire sales funnel. With the acquisition, 10Stories co-founders T.R. Jordan and Benjamin Lu will join the TrackMaven team full-time. Jordan and Lu will open a new TrackMaven office in San Francisco and help to expand the company’s product and engineering teams.
Chicago-based research and insights company Shapiro+Raj has acquired Addison, Texas, social-listening analytics, visualization and engagement solutions firm MutualMind. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. With the acquisition, Shapiro+Raj will combine MutualMind’s digital technologies with its current research and strategy products and services to bring insights to its clients.
Alliances/strategic partnerships
Auburn Hills, Mich., research firm Gongos Inc. and Minneapolis consulting firm Panoramix Global have formed a strategic partnership to help clients understand and analyze business trends and their impact on strategy and product development efforts.
As part of its strategic alliance with Vermont Information Processing (VIP), a Colchester, Vt., supplier of wholesaler depletion data to the alcohol beverage industry, New York-based Nielsen’s scan data reports will be available within VIP iDIG analytics and reporting tool. The integrated tool will provide iDIG users a view of VIP-collected depletion and operational metrics with Nielsen-collected and reported point-of-sale data for all brands and items in a category across multiple geographic markets and retailers. VIP acquired Nielsen’s Beverage Data Network assets last year.
Millward Brown Digital, New York, and Pinterest, San Francisco, have formed a partnership that allows U.S. advertisers to measure the impact of their Pinterest campaigns on brand metrics including awareness, favorability and purchase intent. Brand Lift Insights, Millward Brown Digital’s solution used to measure the impact of campaigns, provides insights into campaign impact on brand measures, allowing marketers to make strategic decisions on their current and future campaigns. Specific to the Pinterest platform, the solution answers questions such as: How do Promoted Pins on Pinterest shift consumers’ perceptions of my brand? Are people more aware of my brand after exposure to Promoted Pins on Pinterest? Using Millward Brown Digital’s practices for measuring advertising effectiveness, surveys are delivered directly in the Pinterest app, allowing consumers to receive the survey in the same environment as they saw the ad without interrupting their experience. Pinterest also offers in-house experimental design technology to identify causal relationships between ad exposure and change in attitudes. Pinners who would have normally been exposed to campaign advertisements are pre-selected before the campaign runs and, instead of a campaign ad, the control group is shown a PSA ad.
St. Louis-based data analytics and consumer insights provider evolve24 is adopting IBM Cloud to host its neuroscience omnichannel data analytics platform for improved performance and scalability. Through its partnership with IBM, Armonk, N.Y., and the move to IBM Cloud, evolve24 plans to improve its competitive advantage, enhance client experiences, expedite new feature delivery and provide new channels to market.
Pharmaceutical Marketing Research Group (PMRG) Executive Director Stephanie Reynders has formed a partnership with the Marketing Research Institute International (MRII) designed to learn more about how the introduction of new research techniques impacts the careers of research practitioners. The new study will be based on earlier work first presented at last year’s Corporate Researcher Conference. The study focused on client and supplier use of and attitudes toward 34 different research techniques. It also asked practitioners how introducing a specific innovation affected their careers. PMRG and MRII plan to expand the study into the health care industry to understand the specific challenges and opportunities of health care research practitioners as they seek to introduce new research techniques into their work. PMRG and MRII will use the research to improve and enhance their educational programs and offerings. Results will be released to the general public at the 2016 PMRG Fall Institute in Cherry Hill, N.J.
Experian DataLabs in North America and San Diego, Calif., mobile engagement and location intelligence solution Gimbal Inc. are working together on data and advanced analytics experiments. By leveraging Gimbal’s suite of macro-location geofencing and micro-location beacons, the findings could help retailers offer instant credit to customers as soon as they walk into a store, as well as give creditors the ability to prequalify their customers on demand for car and home purchases based on the location of their mobile devices. Experian’s DataLabs facility in San Diego, Calif., is outfitted with Gimbal beacons to help Experian’s data scientists use experiments to analyze data and deliver greater competitive advantages.
Oslo, Norway, customer experience software firm Confirmit has extended its relationship with customer Delvinia for another three years. Toronto-based digital innovation company Delvinia leverages the Confirmit Horizons platform for its AskingCanadians and AskingAmericans online data collection businesses, as well as Methodify, a research automation platform.
Association/organization news
AAPOR, ESOMAR and WAPOR have collaborated to launch an international online training tool for journalists to help improve media reporting about polls and survey results. Aimed at journalists, media students, bloggers, voters and anyone interested in why polls work and how they are conducted, the course is hosted by the Poynter Institute, which provides online training for journalists. The course aims to help journalists understand and interpret opinion polls to ensure their reports are as objective as possible and identify what they need to know about a study so they can more critically assess poll quality. The content is based on a course originally developed for the U.S. by AAPOR. It has been updated to cover the latest methodologies including online polls and expanded with examples from all over the world for international coverage. The course is available free of charge.
Awards/rankings
RealityMine, a U.K.-based provider of mobile research technologies and consumer analytics, has been awarded the 2016 Queen’s Award For Enterprise. The company was recognized for outstanding achievement in international trade by the awards, which are made annually by HM The Queen to U.K. businesses. In addition to international trade, awards are also given for innovation and sustainable development. The firm was awarded for the growth it has achieved since its inception in 2012.
InCrowd, a Boston-based provider of real-time market intelligence to health care and life sciences firms, has been included in the “Cool Vendors in Life Sciences, 2016” report published by Stamford, Conn., researcher Gartner Inc.
Netherlands-based data collection software provider Nebu has been nominated for the Rabobank Pioneer Award at the Dutch Crowdfunding Awards 2016. Last year Nebu ran a successful crowdfunding campaign via Symbid, The Crowdfunding Network. The firm’s objective is to accelerate its growth.
Jonathan Price, CEO of digital rewards company Virtual Incentives, Atlanta, has been named a winner in the CEO World Awards in the Most Innovative CEO category. Price won a gold level award for his work in using technology to drive new end-to-end solutions for the digital rewards and incentives space, including the development of the industry’s e-gift card, Virtual Visa and Virtual MasterCard delivery technology.
In New York, Justin Edge, researcher GfK’s global head of health, has received PBIRG’s President’s Award for his contributions to pharma and health market research. Kai Bode, consumer lead for customer strategy and innovation at Merck and president of PBIRG, presented the award at the organization’s annual general meeting. The President’s Award is given each year to a pharmaceutical market research expert who has provided service and support to PBIRG and its goals of delivering research excellence and expertise in the field.
New accounts/projects
Warren, N.J., research firm Lightspeed GMI has signed a multi-year contract with Reston, Va., firm comScore to assist in building and maintaining its Total Home Panel. Concentrating on U.S. households, the panel will enable comScore to measure and better understand the totality of household Internet traffic across all device types including PCs, mobile, tablet, game consoles, connected television and the Internet of Things. To lead this initiative, Lightspeed GMI has hired Chris Fabber as vice president, behavioral panels, AMS.
Univision Communications Inc., a New York-based multimedia company, has signed an agreement for New York-based Nielsen’s National and Local Digital in TV Ratings services. Univision and UniM‡s Networks as well as local affiliate stations will receive audience estimates of linear television content viewing on mobile and computer devices. The audience contributions from the digital devices will be included in the TV ratings.
Business event C2 MontrŽal has selected MontrŽal-based survey software firm Voxco as its official survey technology partner. Voxco’s multi-mode survey platform will be used for the event’s attendee feedback program. Volunteers with tablets administer surveys both inside and outside the event, allowing C2 to have a live read of shifting attendee satisfaction levels during the event and instantly take action on the results if necessary. The feedback program also includes post-event online surveys to measure additional aspects of attendee satisfaction and help evaluate the economic impact of the overall conference.
New companies/new divisions/relocations/expansions
Wilton, Conn., B2B research and advisory firm SiriusDecisions has opened its first office in Latin America, located in Mexico City, and has appointed Paulo Kalapis as Mexico country manager.
Dublin-based research agency RED C Research & Marketing Ltd. has opened a new London office in Soho. RED C Research UK Ltd. is a new joint venture between the agency, together with Richard Barton and Charlotte Butterworth, who both left their MD roles in February to set up the new business.
Marcie Berenson, a market research health care industry veteran, has opened her own firm, Connected Research & Consulting, based in Boca Raton, Fla. Berenson and her team manage global health care and B2B specialty recruiting, including ethnos with B2B and recruitment and management of ad boards for pharma projects.
Research company earnings/financial news
Paris-based researcher Ipsos has reported revenue of Û386.9 million for the first quarter of 2016, up 1.9 percent compared to the same period last year. Total organic growth was reported at 3.7 percent for the first quarter of 2016.
Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, Mass., has reported total revenues of $77.4 million for the first quarter of 2016, compared with $75.2 million for the first quarter of 2015. Research revenues increased 3 percent and advisory services and events revenues increased 4 percent compared with the first quarter of 2015.
San Mateo, Calif., marketing software firm Marketo Inc. has reported that its revenue for first-quarter 2016 increased 35 percent year-over-year to $62.2 million. Deferred revenue increased 37 percent year-over-year to $91.7 million.
Stamford, Conn., researcher Gartner Inc. has reported total revenue of $557.3 million for first-quarter 2016, an increase of 18 percent over first-quarter 2015. Research revenue for first-quarter 2016 was $440.3 million, up 16 percent compared to first-quarter 2015 and consulting revenue was $84.9 million, an increase of 11 percent compared to first-quarter 2015.
Redwood City, Calif., audience technology company YuMe Inc. has reported revenue of $39.2 million for first-quarter 2016, compared to $40.1 million in the first quarter of 2015.
In the first three months of the year, Nuremberg, Germany, firm GfK Group sales totaled Û360.5 million and organic growth amounted to 0.9 percent. Currency effects led to a slight overall decline in sales of 0.6 percent when compared with the first quarter of the previous year. Adjusted operating income increased to Û32.1 million in the first three months of the year, equating to an improvement of 17.6 percent on the previous year’s figure. The GfK Group’s margin rose by 1.4 percentage points to 8.9 percent.
Wellesley Hills, Mass., data management and customer engagement software firm RedPoint Global Inc. has raised $12 million in Series C funding led by Grotech Ventures and WP Global Partners LLC. The funding will enable RedPoint to expand operations to meet demand in international markets, cultivate a growing partner ecosystem and accelerate development of new product offerings.