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November 8, 1999

FutureWeb:
E-Scan: Intelligence On The Web

At A Glance:

E-Scan
Top executive: Jeff Greenberg, president, IRI E-Commerce division
Year founded: 1999
Employees: Not applicable
Amount of venture funding to date: Not applicable
Business: Market- intelligence service that combines consumer products sales data with Web use and buying trends
sure sign of the Web's rapid move into the mainstream of business and everyday life is the recent aggressive Web strategy of old-line industry bulwarks such as Merrill Lynch & Co. Add to that list Information Resources Inc., a 20-year-old, $500 million provider of point-of-sale scanner data to the consumer packaged-goods industry. Information Resources teamed with Web usage-tracking leader Media Metrix Inc. last month to launch E-Scan, the first market-intelligence service that combines Information Resources' traditional grocery-buying data with Web-use statistics and trends. Procter & Gamble Co. began testing the service last summer, and IRI and Media Metrix are jointly marketing E-Scan nationally to other consumer products companies as well as Web sites.

E-Scan's initial survey sample is 3,000 of the 55,000 U.S. households that voluntarily use Information Resources' handheld ScanKey device to scan their supermarket and drugstore purchases and send in the data in exchange for prizes and other incentives. The 3,000 homes have installed Media Metrix software on their PCs to track their Web usage and purchases. All data is anonymous; participants are never identified as individuals.

"We asked ourselves how we could help close the loop between what people are doing on the Web and what they buy in the brick-and-mortar world," says Jeff Greenberg, the 18-year IRI veteran who heads the company's new E-commerce division, from which E-Scan is the first offering. "If people see more Web ads for Oreos, do they buy more? Advertisers are very interested in knowing that."

There isn't a lot of Web commerce in consumer packaged goods, but that's starting to change with the likes of Drugstore.com, HomeGrocer, Peapod, PlanetRX, and Webvan. Information Resources and Media Metrix are betting that mainstream consumer-brand advertisers will soon covet Web data as much as they now do coupon-promotion results or prime-time Nielsen ratings. Web ads will jump from 2% to 7% of all advertising spending in the next four years, according to research firm Jupiter Communications.

Greenberg likens the Web at the end of the 1990s to the early days of television. "People are asking a lot of the same questions," he says. "We'll see many new models develop, particularly as usage data becomes more sophisticated."

But there is a huge difference from TV--the fragmentation of mass markets. "Companies advertise to demographic segments based on particular TV shows, and hope they're the same people who actually buy their products," says Greenberg. With the Web, "We can tell you who your people are--anonymously--and where they're going on the Web. We think that's very appealing."

continue on to the next company: Kinzan.com