• by Joe Mandese , June 15, 2005

In a move that further consolidates its dominance of the media research marketplace, Nielsen Media Research Tuesday said it acquired Audio Audit, a leading developer of electronic media verification systems. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, Nielsen parent VNU is believed to have nearly $1 billion in acquisition funds and has been expected to make either a number of smaller purchases or a potentially big one in either the media or marketing research categories.

While Audio Audit was believed to be in play, its acquisition by Nielsen was somewhat of a surprise, mainly because Nielsen already has its own monitoring, verification and coding systems, leading some to speculate that their may be some unforeseen issue with Nielsen's own coding technologies, possibly its so-called A/P meter system, which was designed to utilize a series of active and passive codes. Recently, Nielsen indicated it would only report ratings data for programmers who actively encoded programming to be detected by the A/P codes.

Audio Audit utilizes what is considered to be a foolproof technology that watermarks digital codes on audio or video content. The company has been building a presence on Madison Avenue and among major marketers as a means of electronically verifying that TV commercials ran as scheduled and precisely in the form they were trafficked.

Terrie Brennan, senior vice president of advertiser services and new business development at Nielsen, indicated that Audio Audit's software would somehow "complement" Nielsen's existing SIGMA verification service. SIGMA has been used for years to track and verify video content distributed to television stations, broadcast networks, and cable networks in all 210 U.S. markets, including overnight reports on direct response ads, infomercials, video news releases, public service announcements, and station and network promos.

Audio Audit, which will be re-branded as a Nielsen service, competes directly with Verance, another electronic verification service, as well as emerging digital media tracking technologies such as Medialink's Teletrax service. Recently, Medialink announced that Teletrax is now being used to monitor digital video content on more than 1,000 TV channels worldwide.