Nielsen announced on August 3rd the acquisition of Israel-based vBrand, a startup building a machine learning-enabled platform for sports programming. Nielsen will leverage the startup’s technology to improve the scale and delivery speed of Nielsen Sport’s “Sport24” and “Social24” products, with a full integration of vBrand into Nielsen Sports planned.
The market for advertising in sports is fragmented and competitive, with spending in entertainment sponsorship expected to exceed $60 billion in 2017. vBrand boosts Nielsen Sports’ already robust sponsorship measurement capabilities with their machine learning-enabled platform using image recognition, deep learning applications, and proprietary AI for the measurement of sports sponsorship exposure in social media, linear and digital TV, and on the internet in real time.
Nielsen Entertainment’s President, Howard Appelbaum, talked about the acquisition in a press release, saying, “Bringing vBrand’s technology into Nielsen Sports’ existing sponsorship valuation process will further expand the scale of programming and events it covers around the world… Nielsen Sports’ brand exposure data and metrics are considered currency in the global sports marketplace, and we’re delighted to strengthen that further with this acquisition.”
The acquisition and merging of vBrand with Nielsen Sports is the latest step in an existing relationship, with vBrand having graduated from Nielsen’s early-stage technology incubator, Nielsen Innovate.
