• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, September 30, 2011

TRA and WPP's court-ordered mediation related to an ongoing lawsuit between the two companies has ended without resolution, TRA said Friday.

In July, TRA sued Kantar for launching in March its RapidView Retail media planning tool service, which it alleged violated patents related to TRA's similar TRAnalytics offering launched several years ago. Kantar, through its parent WPP, had been an early investor in TRA. Both services combine consumer purchase data with TV viewing data to help advertisers plan media strategies and determine how well those strategies worked.

Over the summer, the New York District Court hearing the case ordered the parties to undertake a non-binding mediation session to see if they could resolve the dispute.

Around the same time, TRA requested a preliminary injunction barring RapidView from the marketplace until the case was resolved. That request was denied on Sept. 22 by Judge Shira Scheindlin of the federal court for the Southern District of New York, who concluded that Kantar Media had raised a "substantial question about the validity" of the patent claim on which TRA had based its motion for a preliminary injunction.

The focus of her decision was a legal tenet applied to determine the validity of patents known as "prior art." Patents, she said, may be deemed invalid "if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art, to which said subject matter pertains."

Earlier this week, TRA and Kantar held their mediation session. No details were immediately available on how long it lasted or what was discussed. And so far, no trial date has been set by the court.

TRA said with the case returning to a litigation phase, it would continue to push for a permanent injunction of Kantar's RapidView system -- essentially forcing it to shut down, at least in its current configuration -- and seek damages for patent infringement.

Mark Lieberman, chairman and CEO of TRA, Inc. stated: "TRA's innovations have distanced our software technology from the competition by matching multiple large data sources, such as set-top-box data and frequent shopper data, to produce a more complete media planning and selling solution as well as ROI metrics, all based on actual purchaser behavior. This is a solution we pioneered and one that was publicly lauded by senior executives at WPP when they invested in TRA."

TRA said it currently has more than 45 packaged-goods and pharma brands, and a number of major networks and agencies using its service. It also said that last month, the U.S. Patent Office granted TRA its second major patent related to the service, entitled "Using Consumer Purchase Behavior for Television Targeting."

Kantar declined to comment on case developments.