• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 15, 2009

Omniture and WPP's Kantar Group plan to unveil a partnership Friday that brings together data and analytics gleaned from both online and offline media. The research aims to help companies determine the cause and effect between media, spend and consumer behavior.

The service connects the silos of data that have segregated email, search, display and traditional forms of advertising for years. Successful campaigns now require marketers to understand how pay-per-click and display advertising investments influence more traditional channels such as billboards, radio, television and print, and vice versa. No one medium operates in a vacuum.

Customers are starting to adopt a multichannel view, says John Mellor, Omniture executive vice president of business development and corporate strategy. "Companies spend between 80% and 90% of marketing budgets on traditional media," he says. "All the drum-beating we do about online spend is great, and though small, it's growing very fast compared with total marketing budgets."

Omniture has a history of working with large media companies and enormous data transactions generated from online media. The company has long-standing agreements with Cheetahmail, ExactTarget or Responsys, and search engines Google, Yahoo and Ask. The deal with Kantar gives Omniture access to data streams from mentions in social media, consumer research data and purchasing behavior, as well as billboards, radio, television and print campaigns.

Robert Passikoff, founder and president of New York marketing firm Brand Keys, says companies have begun attempts to integrate offline with online to analyze influence, but not many do it correctly. "Theoretically, it's phenomenal to think about the physiological brain changes that would connect online and offline conversions," he said. "No one's walking around wired up to monitor brain waves. It's difficult to link offline to online conversions."

Although not an easy task, integration to make the service possible has been ongoing for several months. It has been "a substantial effort and commitment" for both companies to determine the correlation between offline and online conversions.

Omniture and Kantar will begin by generating data and combining metrics through Omniture Genesis, a plug-and-play application designed to reduce complexities by automating the integration of marketing tools into the Omniture Online Business Optimization platform. The reports would become available in either a Kantar application or Omniture Site Catalyst.

Omniture will integrate several Kantar offerings including online advertising effectiveness and brand measurement from Dynamic Logic; competitive intelligence, audience demographics and behavioral profiling from TNS Media Compete; and attitudinal and lifestyle insights from Kantar's consumer panels.