New York, NY, November 7, 2011 - Kantar Media, which provides Internet, TV and radio audience measurement in 59 countries worldwide, and GroupM, the leading global media investment management operation that serves as the parent company to WPP media agencies Maxus, MEC, MediaCom, and Mindshare, today announced an on-going effort to integrate Return Path Data (RPD) with other data sets in order to better define consumer behaviour from media consumption through to product usage.

In the first initiative of the program, GroupM will license data from Kantar Media's DFIRECTView™ service to determine the behaviour of audiences viewing Hispanic programming and overlay it with purchase data from Kantar Shopcom, enabling understanding of the correlation with subsequent product purchases. Kantar Shopcom is a data integration, analytics and insight firm.

The initiative will make possible the identification of specific Hispanic Spanish-speaking target audiences; TV tuning by program, commercial, channel and time period; commercial measurement and performance such as tune-away behaviour; product placement measurement; contextual ad performance and TV ROI, matching tuning with product purchase.

DIRECTView is one of the largest national audience measurement services available in the United States, providing anonymous audience viewing behaviour data from 100,000 satellite television subscribers. The service enables measurement of the entire spectrum of live and time-shifted (DVR) audience viewing behaviours across more than 350 channels.

"All GroupM agencies are keenly interested in improving methods of collecting, measuring and interpreting television viewing data," said Lyle Schwartz, head of Implementation Research and Marketplace Analysis for GroupM. "This new effort offers valuable, comprehensive insights on the role media plays in the consumer's path to purchase that will prove invaluable to our clients."

"The initial effort of this initiative allows us, for the first time, the opportunity to explore the relationship between Hispanic programming viewing and purchasing behaviour," says Bud Breheney, Chief Commercial Officer for Kantar Media Audiences North America. "The decision by GroupM to utilize RPD as a tool for better understanding the performance of commercials relative to subsequent purchase behaviour is a strong validation of the role that Kantar Media's DIRECTView can play in enabling more effective budget allocation for clients based on real sales data and identification of incremental sales driving forces."