comScore, Rentrak To Merge, take on Nielsen
Wayne Friedman, Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, (September 30, 2015)
Making a major transfer for new digital and traditional media dimension services and products — as well as amping up competitors with Nielsen — comScore is buying Rentrak. The deal is valued via some at about $732 million, in line with lately’s closing inventory market share worth.
Rentrak — which focuses mostly conventional media size, including tv and film — and comScore, with its industry deep within the digital media area, say the merger will assist the mixed firm focus on speedy urgent industry goals such as developing with new standards for the following era of move-platform size.
Rentrak, which monitors set-prime-box knowledge to resolve how consumers watch television, turns into a subsidiary of comScore, which measures consumer web process.
The move challenges Nielsen in tracking how individuals devour media.
The merger will provide what comScore CEO Serge Matta calls “the move-platform dimension methods of the future.” businesses will have get entry to to the go-platform metrics wanted to plot and execute campaigns.
“This merger also acknowledges the essential significance of mixing digital and tv property for next technology media dimension, which requires a better level of precision at each a national and local market level,” Matta says in a statement.
Shareholders of comScore will personal roughly 66.5% of the combined company, while Rentrak shareholders would own about 33.5%, beneath phrases of the deal. each and every share of Rentrak will probably be transformed into the right to receive 1.15 shares of comScore.
Serge Matta, chief govt officer of comScore, will lead the combined firm. bill Livek, Rentrak’s vice president and chief executive, will serve as the brand new company’s executive vp and president.
based on the deal, Nielsen, a competitor to both companies, stated: “Nielsen has the only total target audience size, comparable throughout all displays. All of our knowledge is fully representative of the U.S. population, and we deliver actually independent measurement.”
It brought: “There are myriad analytics choices for the media trade, however Nielsen’s center of attention is on turning in the real foreign money rankings data used for buying and selling billions of bucks in advertising. This requires sophisticated quality, industrial-potential delivery and gold-same old audited techniques and methods.”
After-market buying and selling had comScore’s refill 7% to $44.50 and Rentrak gaining 13% to $48.99.
In positioning the corporate’s independence for media patrons and dealers, Matta mentioned in an investor call that the WPP group — an incredible global advertising/media firm, which has investments in both companies — should not have a seat on the mixed firm’s board.
WPP staff can have a 16% stake in the mixed company, with an strategy to grow it to 19.9%.
In February of this yr, WPP paid $300 million for a roughly 15% to 20% stake in comScore. In October 2014, WPP offered a sixteen.7% stake in Rentrak for $56 million in cash.
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