Hallmark Channel Becomes the First Cable Network to Combine Nielsen's TV, Retailer and Product Usage Ratings

Hallmark Channel Becomes the First Cable Network to Combine Nielsen's TV, Retailer and Product Usage Ratings

Initial results find that baby boomers account for nearly $230 billion in sales for consumer packaged goods products, representing 55% of total sales.

NEW YORK, Dec. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Hallmark Channel and The Nielsen Company announced today that the family-friendly programmer has become the first cable television network to license The NielsenConnections Brand Target Audience products. These highly targeted products allow Hallmark Channel to document the impact of their programming against advertiser's marketing targets, which will help media buyers and planners better target their client's spending. Hallmark Channel is also the first Nielsen client to include magazines and retail in its cross-platform measurement.

NielsenConnnections' Brand Target Audience: CPG and Brand Target Audience: Pharma products combine Nielsen's Homescan Panel of 125,000 consumers who scan their product purchases - and is used by CPG manufacturers and CPG retailers in market strategy development - with Nielsen's national television sample and its Nielsen Online Internet sample - the currencies of the media business.

"The Nielsen data will allow us to instantly show clients who is buying their products and watching Hallmark Channel. 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," said Bill Abbott, Executive Vice President, Advertising Sales, Hallmark Channel. "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 results of this study will clearly show the unique value of integrating media and consumer data to provide clients with truly comprehensive insights," said Howard Shimmel, Nielsen Senior Vice President of Client Insights. "This new data enables Hallmark to not only better understand its highly valuable audience, but also to document its ability to deliver these influential consumers across all of its platforms."

Nielsen will focus on three specific areas of measurement for Hallmark Channel: cross-platform reach, the spending power of homes using Homescan data and advertiser centric single-source ratings and metrics.

-- First, Hallmark Channel will use Nielsen to document its reach across
the multiple platforms of the trusted Hallmark brand, including:
on-air with Hallmark Channel; online with www.hallmarkchannel.com,
www.hallmarkmoviechannel.com and www.hallmark.com; in retail outlets
with the nearly 4,000 Hallmark Gold Crown Stores; and, in print with
Hallmark Magazine and Hallmark greetings cards. Its first effort will
be to document the reach of Hallmark Channel's umbrella holiday
marketing campaign, "Home for the Holidays," across its multiple
platforms and, for the first time, in Wal-Mart stores.
-- Second, Hallmark Channel will utilize Nielsen Homescan data, which
tracks product purchases across consumer packaged goods, health and
beauty aids and other key product categories, to document both the
overall spending power of consumers, and to specifically address how
brand loyalty differs for baby boomers - Hallmark Channel's core
audience - compared to younger households.
-- Third, Hallmark Channel will license NielsenConnections BTA products
for the consumer products and pharmaceutical categories, which allow
the evaluation of media data against the client's key marketing
targets as opposed to commonly used age and sex demographics.

In its first detailed study using these tools, Nielsen and Hallmark looked at the spending power and brand loyalty of baby boomer households for consumer packaged goods products, using Nielsen Homescan sales data. The key results are:

-- Baby boomers account for nearly $230 billion in sales for consumer
packaged goods products, representing 55% of total sales. Baby boomer
households share of sales is 5 points higher than their share of
population.
-- There are over 6,500 brands measured in Homescan that have over 1% US
penetration. Of those brands, Baby boomers account for over 50% of
sales for 72% of those brands.
-- For 30% of brands, brand loyalty is lower among baby boomers than it
is among younger households (with the head of house age 18-43). For
another 48% of brands, there was no difference in brand loyalty.

About Hallmark Channel

Hallmark Channel, owned and operated by Crown Media Holdings, Inc., is a 24-hour basic cable network that provides a diverse slate of high-quality entertainment programming to a national audience of 86 million subscribers. The top tier program service is distributed through more than 5,450 cable systems and communities as well as direct-to-home satellite services across the country. Hallmark Channel consistently ranks among the top 10 ad-supported cable networks in Prime Time and Total Day household ratings and is the nation's leading network in providing quality family programming. Crown Media also operates a second 24-hour linear channel which plays the greatest family movies of all time, Hallmark Movie Channel, and launched Hallmark Movie Channel HD in April, 2008. For more information, please visit www.hallmarkchannelpress.com

About The Nielsen Company

The Nielsen Company is a global information and media company with leading market positions in marketing and consumer information, television and other media measurement, online intelligence, mobile measurement, trade shows and business publications (Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, Adweek). The privately held company is active in more than 100 countries, with headquarters in New York, USA. For more information, please visit, www.nielsen.com.

Press contacts:

Hallmark Channel
Jennifer Geisser, 212-445-6654
jgeisser@hallmarkchannel.com

Jaime Saberito, 212-445-6644
jsaberito@hallmarkchannel.com

Nancy Carr, 818-755-2643
nancycarr@hallmarkchannel.com

Nielsen
Gary Holmes, 646-654-8975
Gary.Holmes@nielsen.com

Source: Hallmark Channel

CONTACT: Jennifer Geisser, +1-212-445-6654,
jgeisser@hallmarkchannel.com, or Jaime Saberito, +1-212-445-6644,
jsaberito@hallmarkchannel.com, or Nancy Carr, +1-818-755-2643,
nancycarr@hallmarkchannel.com, all of Hallmark Channel; or Gary Holmes of
Nielsen, +1-646-654-8975, Gary.Holmes@nielsen.com, for Hallmark Channel

Web Site: http://www.hallmark.com/
http://www.nielsen.com/

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