The 2009 Honomichl Top 50 Report

America’s top 50 research firms saw domestic revenues fall 3.5% to $8.61bn in 2009. 2009 non-US research revenue at $9.47bn represented 52.4% of the total generated, and was also down on the figure two years earlier ($9.81bn).

by Leonard Murphy

Chief Advisor for Insights and Development at Greenbook

The Honomichl Top 50, published by the American Marketing Association magazine, Marketing News, is out. The headline is that America’s top 50 research firms saw domestic revenues fall 3.5% to $8.61bn in 2009. This compares with a 1.6% increase to $8.98bn in 2008. 2009 non-US research revenue at $9.47bn represented 52.4% of the total generated, and was also down on the figure two years earlier ($9.81bn).

The bad news: Revenue at Bellomy Research plummeted 25.7% to $12.4m, while at Harris Interactive – pending the effect of a series of recovery initiatives – revenue dropped 24.0% to $100.1m. Burke Inc. also saw a 23.4% decline in revenue to $38.9m.

The good news: high revenue growth was seen at online customer community developer Communispace (up 18.0% to $34.7m), and multi-screen measurement specialist Rentrak (up 22% to $14.4m), which yesterday reported a 91% drop in fourth-quarter profit.

What jumps out at me is that growth occurred in non-traditional and syndicated product suppliers. That should be a strong signal to the industry about the direction we should head in, right?

US revenue for the top 10 US agencies was:

US Rank	Organization	US Research Revenues($ millions)	% change from 2008
1	Nielsen	2,298.0	3.0
2	Kantar	850.9	-10.4
3	IMS Health	801.1	-5.9
4	Westat	502.4	7.0
5	SymphonyIRI Group	441.7	-0.7
6	Arbitron	379.1	4.0
7	Ipsos	288.8	-7.3
8	GfK USA	288.5	-11.7
9	Synovate	214.5	-12.4
10	J.D. Power and Associates	164.4	-13.7

Rate of growth from year to year has been adjusted so as not to include revenue gains or losses from acquisitions or divestitures

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Leonard Murphy

Chief Advisor for Insights and Development at Greenbook

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