Nielsen's PRIZM hooks up with online data platform

For decades, Nielsen's demographic and lifestyle segmentation tool, PRIZM, has been used by traditional marketers to target consumers offline, right down to household level.

PRIZM segments (.pdf) are based on socioeconomic and demographic data such as income, race, occupation, education and household composition. Other lifestyle attributes are also considered, including where the audience spends their vacations, what car they drive and their favorite brands.

Now, thanks to a partnership with DataLogix's Affiniti Data Platform, which enables media companies and agencies to find Internet users based on offline behaviors and attributes, each of those Internet users can be assigned one of Nielsen's 66 PRIZM segments. This means online marketers can target segments of American society according to their lifestyle segment including types such as "Young Digerati", "Heartlanders" and "Kids & Cul-de-Sacs".

"This new offering with DataLogix will provide advertisers the ability to deliver the right message to the right audience across products and services in any industry," said Justin Evans, SVP for Marketing and Strategy for The Nielsen Company. "Together we give advertisers and agencies added confidence to further incorporate and invest in the Internet as part of the total marketing mix."

Last year, Nielsen Mobile partnered with Nielsen Claritas to launch Mobile-PRIZM, designed to help advertisers and marketers better target mobile audiences.

"The reason that we're doing this is so that they have the confidence that they can target the audiences in the same way they do in other media and target them the same way in mobile," said Kanishka Agarwal, vice president of mobile media at Nielsen Mobile, San Francisco.

Tags: audience segmentation, consumer targeting, mobile marketing, Nielsen, online advertising, online marketing, PRIZM