First initiative will overlay purchase data from Kantar Shopcom with Hispanic audience tuning behavior licensed from DIRECTView™
New York, NY, November 7, 2011 -- Kantar Media, which provides Internet, TV and radio audience measurement in 59 countries worldwide, and GroupM, the leading global media investment management operation that serves as the parent company to WPP media agencies Maxus, MEC, MediaCom, and Mindshare, today announced an ongoing effort to integrate Return Path Data (RPD) with other data sets in order to better define consumer behavior from media consumption through to product usage.
In the first initiative of the program, GroupM will license data from Kantar Media’s DIRECTView™ service to determine the behavior of audiences viewing Hispanic programming and overlay it with purchase data from Kantar Shopcom, enabling understanding of the correlation with subsequent product purchases. Kantar Shopcom is a data integration, analytics and insight firm.
The initiative will make possible the identification of specific Hispanic Spanish-speaking target audiences; TV tuning by program, commercial, channel and time period; commercial measurement and performance such as tune-away behavior; product placement measurement; contextual ad performance and TV ROI, matching tuning with product purchase.
DIRECTView is one of the largest national audience measurement services available in the United States, providing anonymous audience viewing behavior data from 100,000 satellite television subscribers. The service enables measurement of the entire spectrum of live and time-shifted (DVR) audience viewing behaviors across more than 350 channels.
“All GroupM agencies are keenly interested in improving methods of collecting, measuring and interpreting television viewing data,” said Lyle Schwartz, head of Implementation Research and Marketplace Analysis for GroupM. “This new effort offers valuable, comprehensive insights on the role media plays in the consumer’s path to purchase that will prove invaluable to our clients.”
“The initial effort of this initiative allows us, for the first time, the opportunity to explore the relationship between Hispanic programming viewing and purchasing behavior,” says Bud Breheney, Chief Commercial Officer for Kantar Media Audiences North America. “The decision by GroupM to utilize RPD as a tool for better understanding the performance of commercials relative to subsequent purchase behavior is a strong validation of the role that Kantar Media’s DIRECTView can play in enabling more effective budget allocation for clients based on real sales data and identification of incremental sales driving forces.”
About GroupM
GroupM is the leading global media investment management operation. It serves as the parent company to WPP media agencies including Maxus, MEC, MediaCom, and Mindshare. Our primary purpose is to maximize the performance of WPP’s media communications agencies on behalf of our clients, our stakeholders and our people by operating as a parent and collaborator in performance-enhancing activities such as trading, content creation, sports, digital, finance, proprietary tool development and other business-critical capabilities. The agencies that comprise GroupM are all global operations in their own right with leading market positions. The focus of GroupM is the intelligent application of physical and intellectual scale to benefit trading, innovation, and new communication services, to bring competitive advantage to our clients and our companies.
About Kantar Media
Kantar Media provides strategic advice and competitive intelligence to the world’s leading brands, publishers, agencies and industry bodies, helping them navigate and succeed in a rapidly evolving media industry. This includes analysis of paid media opportunities; counsel on brand reputation, corporate management and consumer engagement through owned media; and, evaluating consumers’ reactions in earned media. Kantar Media provides clients with a broad range of insights, from audience research, competitive intelligence, vital consumer behavior and digital insights to marketing effectiveness and online influence. Our experts currently work with 22,000 companies tracking 3 million brands in 50 countries. www.KantarMediaNA.com

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