Nielsen Co. and the Hallmark Channel have teamed up to apply Nielsen tracking across Hallmark’s multiple brand platforms, including the Hallmark cable channel, Hallmark Web sites, Gold Crown retail stores and Hallmark Magazine.
With NielsenConnections’ Brand Target Audience tools, Hallmark aims to gauge its influence on consumers, particularly its core audience of Baby Boomers. By tracking product purchases against audience data, the company should be able to better understand its audience and show advertisers its ability to drive purchases. Nielsen’s measurements for Hallmark will largely focus on cross-platform reach, the spending power of homes using Nielsen Homescan and advertiser-based single-source ratings and metrics.
“The Nielsen data will allow us to instantly show clients who is buying their products and watching Hallmark Channel,” Bill Abbott, EVP of advertising sales for Hallmark Channel, said in a statement. “By providing advertisers with this targeted information, we help them realize the full economic value of their buying decisions and help them move beyond the traditional dependence on age/sex demos. Being able to more effectively reach their core customer base in this way is essential for advertisers and for the future growth of the media industry as a whole – especially during these challenging economic times.”
“The way TV advertising has largely been sold is by demographics, and those demo data have really been a substitute for what real customers are like,” added Gary Holmes, a spokesman for the Nielsen Co. “They were rough estimates, so Nielsen is putting together information about what consumers are actually buying. We know that certain people buy certain products and that certain people buy things they see on TV, and certain people go online. We’re fusing those data together to find a new metric that targets the actual buying customer.”
Hallmark is the first cable channel to use these offerings and is the first Nielsen client to include magazines and retail in its multichannel measurement. Hallmark will start using the new tools to measure its “Home for the Holidays” campaign, which is running across its platforms and in Wal-Mart stores.
