Lisa Silverman Meyers
Vice President, Planning and Marketing Services
Nickelodeon & Viacom Consumer Products

Since its launch in 1979, Nickelodeon has grown to become the number-one entertainment brand for kids. The diverse, global business includes television programming and production in the United States and around the world, plus consumer products, online, recreation, books, magazines, and feature films. In the U.S., Nickelodeon is seen in almost 92 million households and has been the number-one rated basic cable network for eleven consecutive years. Its highly popular properties range from Dora the Explorer and The Wonderpets!  to SpongeBob SquarePants and Drake & Josh. Nickelodeon & Viacom Consumer Products (NVCP) is the third largest licensing business in the world and the division’s ongoing growth requires strategic decision-making at every step.

Vice President, Planning and Marketing Services for Nickelodeon and Viacom Consumer Products (NVCP), Lisa Silverman Meyers, credits NPD as an important resource for NVCP’s business and marketing decisions. “NPD data helps us make more informed business decisions about our properties, our partners, and our businesses. NPD helps us answer what we should be putting our resources toward, which partners are best positioned to meet our business and strategic goals, and what trends are breaking through in the marketplace,” she said.  “For example, by looking at trends in the toy area, we’ve been able to work with partners to develop new lines, growing incremental areas into significant parts of our business in a short amount of time.” 

Silverman Meyers looks to NPD to help explain the unique dynamics of the business to those outside the worlds of licensing and children’s products, she explained. “It enables us to put our performance in the context of the industry in a very definable way that we would not be able to accomplish without the information.”

NPD information serves to quantify questions and impressions about Nickelodeon properties, “putting hard numbers behind performance in order to build and increase space at retail,” she said. That’s key in the highly competitive kid’s licensing space, Silverman Meyers said. “Retailers live and die by the numbers.  NPD’s data helps us to speak their language to ensure that the right products and properties are getting onto shelves.  This helps us be very concrete about performance.”

To NVCP, the NPD relationship is about more than delivering data. “NPD acts as our partner. They understand our business needs, and help us get the information that we need. They provide valuable external market intelligence that informs all our key decisions,” she said.

For more information about how to make NPD information a critical part of your company’s business decisions, e-mail contactnpd@npd.com.