• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, April 1, 2014

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.

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.