• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, July 28, 2015

WPP’s Kantar Media on Tuesday announced it has invested in BIScience, a data analytics firm. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

The deal signals Kantar Media's official foray into programmatic media measurement, a space the company had only implicitly measured in the past. The WPP firm tracks ad spend, and it asserts that the investment in BIScience grows its real-time tracking capabilities -- namely in the programmatic marketplace.

BIScience measures programmatic campaigns across channels to aid marketers in campaign planning and optimization. BIScience claims to track campaign performance across over half a million publishers and mobile apps. 

Kantar boasts that through BIScience, clients will now have access to “granular competitor insights within the programmatic advertising industry, including, but not limited to, share of voice (advertiser, publisher, campaign, creative, and mediator), impressions and ad spend, unique publisher audience and traffic data, aggregated RTB rates, and ad platform usage.”

“Digital and programmatic are increasing in importance,” commented Andy Brown, chairman and CEO of Kantar, in a prepared statement.

The BIScience investment is just the latest bet Kantar has placed on digital and programmatic. Last month, Kantar added the other form of biddable media -- search -- to its reporting.