• by Sarah Mahoney , December 7, 2006

VNU and the In-Store Marketing Institute announced yesterday that they will form Nielsen In-Store, designed to measure how customers react to point-of-purchase media, including television and radio, shelf talkers, and digital signage.

The new service will build on P.R.I.S.M. (Pioneering Research for an In-Store Metric), a research effort led by the In-Store Marketing Institute early this year in conjunction with marketers 3M, Coca-Cola, Kellogg, Miller Brewing, Procter & Gamble and The Walt Disney Company, as well as retailers Albertsons, Kroger, Walgreens and Wal-Mart.

VNU said that in-store marketing approaches are the sixth-largest advertising vehicle in the U.S., at $18.6 billion in spending in 2005.

VNU said the new service will also help retailers improve results through better store layouts, category adjacencies and product selection. It will provide the advertising, media and retail industries with a new currency standard that can increase the efficiency of the media buying and selling process.

George Wishart has been named global managing director of Nielsen In-Store. Previously, he was president and CEO of VNU's Interactive Market Systems (IMS), a provider of media-planning software.

The new service is scheduled for an initial launch in the U.S. early in 2007. The metric will then be fine-tuned before it is made widely available to the industry later in the year.