Nielsen Teams with Trax to Offer At-Shelf Insights

Nielsen has formed an alliance with Trax to provide shelf insights to the consumer packaged goods marketplace.

Billed as the first service of its kind in the U.S., the alliance will produce a joint syndicated solution dubbed the "Shelf Intelligence Suite" that will digitize shelves to give CPGs more frequent, accurate measurement of in-store presence and subsequent sales impact. 

The suite consists of two solutions: 

• "Shelf Pulse," which provides CPGs with ongoing measurement of in-store shelf conditions for their brands and competitors, shelf compliance vs. plan and visual proof of store activation. 
• "Shelf Blueprint," which provides predictive analytics to help CPGs set strategy for store merchandising (such as facings, adjacencies, shelf placement and flow).

The partners will also launch a new category benchmark for the marketplace called the "Shelf Quality Index" that will enable brands to measure their performance relative to the category in terms of shelf share, observed promotions, shelf pricing and other key performance indicators. 

Trax operates a computer vision and analytics platform that turns photographs of the shelf into insights that can be used to improve in-store execution strategies. The alliance with Nielsen would theoretically help the Singapore-based company build greater scale in the U.S. Clients have included Coca-Cola, AB InBev, Heineken, Nestle and Henkel.