Kantar Media partners with Mindshare

Kantar Media & Mindshare partnered together on a recent study to demonstrate that programme related tweets lead to an increase in TV audience in an example of ‘Horizontality in Action’. Study shows Twitter has some form of positive causation in 11% of episodes analysed, adding 2% to the total audience during the broadcasts.

The research study is part of Kantar Media’s global partnership with Twitter supported by WPP’s Data Alliance to bring official Twitter TV metrics to markets in the UK, Spain, the Nordics, Russia, as well as parts of Africa and south-east Asia. Whilst other studies have demonstrated that Twitter can have a causal effect on TV ratings and vice versa, this study proved the positive effect Twitter has on TV viewing in the UK and then quantified how much viewing Twitter actually drives.

The study found:

1. Twitter does drive TV viewing - In 11% of episodes analysed, programme related tweets had a positive causal effect on viewing levels to the programme.

2. Twitter can drive significant audience volumes - It drove c2% of the viewing amongst these episodes (equating to 0.2% of the viewing across all of the episodes in the study).

3. Twitter works best in driving audiences for genres which are more inclined to be watched live - Comedy (7-9%), Reality (4%) & Entertainment (3%) saw the highest proportion of their audiences driven by Twitter

4. TV does of course also drive Twitter volume – Changes in TV ratings levels were observed to have had a positive causal effect on volumes of programme related tweets in 53% of episodes.

The project is the perfect example of Horizontality in action across the group, maximising the capabilities and expertise within the group for the purposes of this independent study.