Wal-Mart Pulls out of PRISM - Updated 30th Jan

I have veered away from the nitty gritty of shopper marketing research on this blog but this is significant news from Shopper Marketing magazine:

P.R.I.S.M. to Roll Out Without Walmart

Shopper Marketing magazine has learned that Walmart, an active member of the P.R.I.S.M. (Pioneering Research for an In-Store Metric) industry consortium during both the pilot and scaling phases of the project, will not participate in the launch of the national syndicated data service next year.

According to Nielsen, "Walmart was pleased with the insights they gleaned but has opted out of the syndicated service, consistent with their internal data sharing policies."

This really undermines the credibility of this initiative. Wal-Mart clearly are not keen on their valuable in store space being monetized and lumped in with everyone elses. Somehow, however, I find it hard to shed tears for Nielsen.

Updated

More here

A few interesting points:

"It was interesting at first," he said. "But when you poke at it a little more, it gets a little less interesting."

Pretty faint praise. I guess there is a lot of modelling of the data that makes it suspect.

And this:

For its part, Walmart is incorporating its own service to measure shopper-marketing return on investment -- DS-IQ -- into the rollout of its Smart Network, a next-generation in-store TV network to be operated by Thomson's Premier Retail Networks in 2,700 stores on 27,000 screens by early 2010.

Wal-Mart is not a team player.