VMS Merges with VoiceTrak and Burrelle's Advertising Services

VMS, the leading media monitoring service, announced the merger of VoiceTrak and Burrelle's Advertising Services into the VMS Advertising Services division. The merger creates one source for the world's largest competitive advertising library, and expands VMS into local market advertising expenditure information.

VoiceTrak, a 10 year old Arizona based company, surveys the local media in all US markets to produce the most comprehensive local market spending data available, including local broadcast and cable television, radio, newspaper, magazines, and outdoor advertising spending data. Quarterly reports aggregate spending by category, advertiser, and medium.

The Burrelle's Advertising Service group component, merged with VoiceTrak in 1999, expands the VMS Advertising Library print capability to over 700 publications read on a syndicated basis, and enables seamless linkage to the entire Burrelle's publication reading base of over 18,000 US publications.

"The VoiceTrak and Burrelle's advertiser and agency clients will now be able to take advantage of a greatly expanded range of offerings with one point of contact. Customers can now readily receive the multi-media data they really need from one source, enabling VMS to create the most cost-effective data packages. Likewise, our current VMS clients will benefit from a greatly expanded service available through their current VMS representative," said Michael Kaufman, president, VMS.

"Our clients want to take advantage of all the top-of-the-line competitive information they can get, but at the same time they are under pressure to control costs. The combination of VMS Ad Services with VoiceTrak and Burrelle's Ad Services will allow us to help the users of all three services achieve both of these goals", said DeWitt Mallary, senior vice president, VMS, who will oversee the combined operation. "Our goal is to be eyes and ears for our customers, and supply the competitive advertising intelligence they need in timely and usable packages."

VMS has the world's largest competitive advertising library, including television and radio commercials, newspaper and magazine ads, and Internet and outdoor advertising. The VMS Advertising Library, which includes the archives of Radio TV Reports, is available on an ad-hoc basis through the VMS regional offices in the key advertising markets, or by subscription connection over the Internet. VMS is also the leading source of television and print advertising creative from over 50 countries around the world.