Arbitron, Nielsen Ground Project Apollo

By Jon Lafayette

Arbitron and the Nielsen Co. said they have terminated the development of Project Apollo, a research system that gathered data on media usage and store sales in order to measure advertising effectiveness.

“Despite a promising level of interest, we did not secure sufficient client commitments to make Project Apollo a sustainable venture for our two companies,” Arbitron and Nielsen said Monday in a joint statement.

Seven advertisers, led by Procter & Gamble, signed on as members of the Project Apollo steering committee.

There had been great hopes that, by linking Arbitron portable people meter data with in-store register scanner information, new insights about how media advertising worked could be gleaned. But the project was expensive and some executives said the results were underwhelming.

A national panel of 11,000 people in 5,000 households was deployed in January 2006.