AdAge’s Jack Neff: Walmart pulling out “a blow to a widely lauded initiative”
“It was interesting at first,” he said. “But when you poke at it a little more, it gets a little less interesting.”
Walmart isn’t saying much about their recent move to get out of PRISM, and the folks at Nielsen are doing the best to put a good face on, but Jack Neff doesn’t sugarcoat it in his December 30, 2008 article:
“PRISM, a syndicated-data service that tracks the audience and effectiveness of in-store advertising and merchandising, dealing a blow to a widely lauded initiative that aims to put shopper marketing on par with other consumer media by giving it a similar measurement system.”
Walmart said they were “pleased with the insights they gleaned” and blamed internal policy of “internal data-sharing policies.” Which roughly translates to: “I’m the only big boy that’s doing well in this economy. I’ve learned all I need to know and I’m not sharing anything that goes on in the store with their competitors.”
Jeff interviews an anonymous source who is an executive in a “marketer and PRISM consortium member” that gives his take in the article and compared PRISM to Apollo, another large-scale project:
As with Apollo, the cost of PRISM data, which the executive said ranges from the low- to mid-six figures annually (up to seven figures for bigger marketers), is particularly daunting in the current economy. While it pales in comparison to media or trade-promotion budgets, he said PRISM’s cost is huge for syndicated market research.
“Nielsen and Arbitron pulled the plug on Apollo earlier this year, after spending more than $45 million combined to develop the service, when they couldn’t get enough marketers to subscribe.”
Walmart’s efforts with DS-IQ and Thomson’s Premier Retail Networks are also mentioned.
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