[April 22, 2015]

IRI Launches Two New Premium Data Packages to Enable Better Understanding Impact of Weather and Gas Prices on Shopper Decisions

Information Resources Inc. (IRI^™) announced today that weather conditions and gas prices are now integrated within IRI's Market Measurement service, leveraging IRI's Liquid Data^™ information and insights platform. For the first time ever, IRI clients can now integrate the weather data and gas data into a variety of IRI solutions, including enterprise software, such as IRI Market Advantage^™, or as a data layer within custom consulting and analytics projects.

These new causal factors represent IRI's ongoing efforts to make available information on additional drivers to sales. For example, the weather data enable clients to answer questions about how specific temperature levels impact sales, what categories or items are most influenced by specific weather conditions, and how those shifts vary by geography and client.

Historically, gas and weather data have not been available as part of an integrated point-of-sale (POS) solution, or the data were gathered manually, requiring countless hours of effort. The lack of data availability and integration has prevented the CPG industry from understanding the impact gas prices and weather conditions have on consumer motivations and purchase behavior.

"In the past, 'notable changes in the weather or gas prices' might be cited as the source for unexplained dramatic shifts in shopping behavior," said senior vice president of product management, Clay Dodson, IRI. "IRI's fully integrated weather and gas price data immediately support or refute those assumpions. Understanding the sales impact due to weather and gas varies by market, but it's important to have visibility into integrated data sets while sales or merchandising plans are established. For some categories, we've seen specific weather and gas conditions consistently occur during their best and worst weeks, four to six years running."

Weather data are provided by AccuWeather^® and enable IRI to deliver a multitude of attributes, including temperature, precipitation, humidity, snowfall, minutes of sunshine and departure from normal to highlight weather extremes. IRI's gas data are derived from the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS) and are sourced from more than 120,000 gas stations. Price information is available for gas grades, including regular, midgrade, premium and diesel.

IRI's weather and gas data packages complement category sales from a measurement and predictive perspective. When used in conjunction with additional IRI data sources, CPG marketers get a comprehensive view of the marketplace and a better understanding of sales catalysts and how to effectively manage sales drivers.

In the near future, IRI plans to add several more data sources to IRI's Liquid Data information and insights platform.

About the IRI Partner Ecosystem

IRI fundamentally believes that delivering differentiated growth for clients requires deep, highly integrated partnering with a variety of best-of-breed companies. As such, IRI works closely with a broad range of industry leaders to create innovative joint solutions, services and access to capabilities to help its clients more effectively compete in their various markets and exceed their growth objectives. IRI is committed to its partnership philosophy and continues to actively enhance its ecosystem of partners through alliances, joint ventures, acquisitions and affiliations. The IRI Partner Ecosystem includes such companies as The Boston Consulting Group, comScore (News - Alert), Datalogix (an Oracle company), Experian, GfK, Intage, Ipsos, Kantar, MasterCard Advisors, MaxPoint, Millward Brown Digital, Oracle (News - Alert) Data Cloud, Rentrak, SPINS, Univision and others.

About IRI:

IRI is a leader in delivering powerful market, consumer and media exposure information, predictive analytics and the foresight that leads to action. We go beyond the data to ignite extraordinary growth for our clients in the CPG, retail and over-the-counter health care industries by pinpointing what matters and illuminating how it can impact their businesses. Move your business forward at www.iriworldwide.com.

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