WPP’s Kantar and Twitter have struck a new five-year agreement to collaborate on new research products in the areas of advertising effectiveness, consumer insight, brand equity, customer satisfaction and media measurement.
In addition, the companies have agreed to expand the connections between select Kantar and Twitter data assets.
The agreement is the latest in a series of deals between the two companies. Kantar CEO Eric Salama said the new deal would “build on the learning and successes of our initial collaboration in the area of social TV. Incorporating Twitter as the 'data of now' will allow us to make real-time predictive research a reality for our clients across a range of our services.”
Kantar and Twitter initially announced their agreement to jointly develop a suite of tools to support planning and analytics for the UK TV industry in August 2013. This agreement was subsequently extended to Spain in October 2013 and is now being extended to Scandinavia, Russia and parts of Africa and Southeast Asia.
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The jointly developed suite of tools under that agreement enable broadcasters to assess
programs and series, plan program promotions more effectively and help media buyers and sellers to integrate insights from social data more comprehensively into the TV component of their media
mix.
“Twitter plays host to a real-time, public conversation at scale on all manner of topics -- including television,” said Twitter COO Ali Rowghani. “We’re
thrilled to expand our partnership with Kantar beyond media measurement, to other areas that impact their clients. We’re also looking forward to working with Kantar to bring Twitter TV standards
and measurement tools to more regions across the globe.”
An earlier agreement, signed in June 2013 with Kantar parent WPP and the Data Alliance, covers other WPP divisions, including media management arm GroupM and digital agencies such as Wunderman.
I wonder where the Twitter agreement with Nielsen's Social Guide fits into this new agreement with Kantar. It sounds like Twitter is experimenting with both companies to find new revenue streams. Since there is a Twitter firehose which provides access to Twitter data to multiple companies in the field of data analytics and insights, I fail to see the uniqueness of this deal. Unless if Twitter will disclose more information to Kantar about its users and their online behavior than what it is available in the data available through the firehose. My 2 cents is that innovation in the space of consumer insights will not come from the likes of Nielsen and Kantar, they are too inflexible to allow creativity to flourish and they are "burdened" by their knowledge. If anyone knows the answer to these questions or has a view on the subject please do share.