Best-Selling Authors Malcolm Gladwell and Tom Davenport Join Industry Leaders Including Coca-Cola, Kimberly-Clark, Food Lion and Ocean Spray As Keynotes at Nielsen’s Consumer 360 Conference

Schaumburg, Ill. – The Nielsen Company today announced the lineup of keynote speakers for its annual Consumer 360 (www.consumer360.com) conference, taking place May 12 - 14 at the JW Marriott Orlando Grande Lakes in Orlando. The consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry’s premier educational and networking event attracts more than 1,000 industry professionals each year.

“We’ve structured this year’s conference to offer value by providing rich content designed with CPG companies’ needs in mind” said John J. Lewis, president and CEO, Nielsen Consumer North America. “Collaborating in today’s difficult times demands new insight, shared experiences, best practices and recognized experts’ opinions. Consumer 360 will present all of that making it a ‘can’t miss’ event absolutely worth your time and investment.”

In keeping with this year’s theme, “Clarity through Collaboration,” industry leaders will offer insights for CPG manufacturers and retailers to understand how to successfully engage and win consumers in the ever-changing economic landscape. The conference will open with remarks by David L. Calhoun, chairman and CEO of The Nielsen Company and Lewis. Featured keynotes include:

* Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of Outliers, The Tipping Point and Blink, staff writer, The New Yorker magazine.
“Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Others Don’t” – An outlier is a statistical term for a phenomenon that lies outside of everyday experience that cannot be explained by the normal rules. Gladwell zeros in on people who have achieved over and above what’s normally expected. He talks about well-known people like Bill Gates, Mozart and the Beatles, and patterns of success in sports and finance and law and a host of other fields with his now-famous flair for eloquence, charm and telling stories. The idea is that there is always something important and valuable to learn when you look in the right way at these extraordinary histories of outliers. Gladwell talks about the structure of opportunity and achievement and the role of hard work and cultural legacies in defining expectations about performance and success, and offers provocative suggestions about how society can help nurture success for everyone.

* Tom Davenport, Author, Competing on Analytics, Babson College Professor
“Competing on Analytics” – Davenport will describe how some leading organizations compete on the basis of their analytical capabilities and fact-based decision-marking. He has identified more than 50 companies that base their strategies at least in part on their analytical orientations. Davenport will define what it means to compete on analytics and how analytical organizations achieve high performance.

* Ken Romanzi, Chief Operating Officer, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc.
“Reintroducing the Cranberry to America” – After the cranberry world turned upside down, Ocean Spray leveraged key insights on consumers and the category to reintroduce cranberry to the world. In the mid-1990s, barrel prices went from a high of $60 per barrel to an all-time low of $11 per barrel, causing grower-owners to lose money on the crop they worked so hard to deliver. Ocean Spray set out to revitalize the category with a re-launch of Cranberry through a fully-integrated consumer centric marketing program that communicates the taste, health, heritage and beauty of the cranberry harvest for its consumers.

* Tim Snelling, Vice President, North American Consumer Sales, Kimberly-Clark
Derrick Penick, Senior Vice President of Merchandising and Distribution, Food Lion
“Clarity through Collaboration” – In these turbulent times, perhaps never has it been more important to understand the dynamics of today’s consumer marketplace. Suppliers and retailers must communicate and work together as they never have before. Both Kimberly-Clark and Food Lion are leaders in collaborating with their trading partners. Snelling and Penick will share their approaches to collaboration and offer opinions on how that process can be clarified and strengthened even further.

* Katie Bayne, Chief Marketing Officer, Coca-Cola North America
“Media Fragmentation” – Media fragmentation is changing the way we market to consumers, with endless opportunities to reach them. Bayne’s experience and expertise will raise a level of awareness and conscientiousness about the need to understand what is happening as a result of all the spending being waged against today’s ever elusive consumer. She will speak about Coke’s Olympic sponsorship to demonstrate how Coca-Cola leverages new and traditional media to best reach its target audience. Not only is media changing, but so are the metrics used to track it. Bayne will discuss the importance of understanding the right results metrics used to drive marketing ROI.

* Joe Uva, CEO, Univision
“From Hispanic Marketing to Total Marketing” – Univision is the fifth largest television network in America, catering to the rapidly growing Hispanic market. Understanding and capitalizing on the growth of the U.S. Hispanic market requires a keen understanding of consumer insights. Uva will present key findings of Univision’s proprietary study on Latinas and health and beauty and will identify growth opportunities for CPG companies. With larger families and a trillion dollars of purchasing power, the Hispanic market remains and untapped growth opportunity for many brands.

* Dr. A.K. Pradeep, President and CEO, NeuroFocus
“The Three Screens . . .Where the Mind is At . . .” – Breakthroughs in neuroscience research offer deeper insights than ever before. Neurological testing measures the consumer’s true brain response, free from cultural and educational biases, gender difference or language barriers. Subconscious Resonance detects brain activity where 95 percent of decisions are made - -below the conscious level. With data flowing at 2,000 times a second from each of the 64 EEG sensors giving full brain coverage, NeuroFocus translates billions of data points into primary metrics of Attention, Emotional Engagement and Memory Retention – second-by-second – as consumers engage with CPG messaging, products, packaging and every other aspect of consumer interaction. Neuromarketing leverages the pure power of neuroscience to address the fundamental questions of brand management.

Nielsen thought leaders Pete Blackshaw, Todd Hale and James Russo will also present keynote addresses.

“Today’s business environment is unmatched, mandating that CPG manufacturers and retailers collaborate by understanding consumers’ changing behavior more than ever,” said Lewis. “Finding ways to work together to create immediate, innovative and integrated solutions necessary for success in today’s tough environment is what Consumer 360 is all about.”

Registration details and the full conference schedule, including more than 25 concurrent and hands-on sessions, are available at www.consumer360.com.

The Nielsen Company is a global information and media company with leading 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.