Kantar and Twitter enters into a global partnership

Kantar and Twitter have entered an enhanced global partnership with agreement over 5 years.  Under the program name “Data of Now,” both parties have agreed to collaborate on new research products in the areas of advertising effectiveness, consumer insight, brand equity, customer satisfaction and media measurement.

Additionally, the companies have agreed to expand the connections between select Kantar and Twitter data assets and accelerate innovation. 

Kantar CEO Eric Salama said: “We are very pleased to be extending this relationship and 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.”

“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.”

At the same time, Kantar and Twitter have announced an extension of their exclusive partnership for the provision of social TV ratings and analytics. The agreement will see the relationship grow from its current base in the UK and Spain to include the Nordics, Russia, as well as parts of Africa and south-east Asia.

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.

The tools bring together social TV data from Twitter with the audience research expertise of Kantar Media. They enable broadcasters to assess programmes and series, plan programme promotions more effectively and assist media buyers and sellers to integrate insights from social data more comprehensively into the TV 

component of their media mix.

The Kantar/Twitter partnership followed an earlier agreement signed in June 2013 with Kantar parent company WPP and the Data Alliance, which covers other WPP divisions including media investment management company GroupM and digital agencies such as Wunderman.