Product Similarities Strain Relations for WPP and TRA

Marcoms giant WPP has filed a lawsuit against media measurement and analytics firm TRA, reportedly over claims by the latter that its Media TRAnalytics tool has been 'ripped off' by WPP subsidiary Kantar Media Audiences.

WPP and its investment arm Cavendish Square Holdings are investors in TRA, alongside Arbitron and Kodak Venture Partners.

According to a report published in AdWeek, WPP has filed the suit in the Manhattan Federal Court in response to correspondence TRA sent to Cavendish, claiming that Kantar's recently launched RapidView product 'ripped off' its own Media TRAnalytics solution.

TRA's patented Media TRAnalytics matches TV data from set-top boxes (STBs) in 1.7 million households with CPG purchasing data from 57 million households, to link ads actually received with the products the same households actually buy.

RapidView combines consumer purchase data with return path data from STBs. The service links data from the 100,000 national households which comprise the firm's DIRECTView service, with purchase behavior data drawn from the Kantar Shopcom database containing transaction-level data for 231 million US consumers.

In the court filing, WPP is requesting a determination of whether it is infringing TRA's patent. While Kantar Media Audiences concedes that TRA owns the patent: 'Analyzing Return on Investment of Advertising Campaigns by Matching Multiple Data Sources', the firm denies that its Rapid View product is a copy.

TRA has reportedly prevented Cavendish's Board member from attending a meeting in connection with the dispute, and says it will exclude her from future meetings in breach of its investor agreement.

Separately, TRA has today launched Media TRAnalytics 3.0 with 'StoryFinder', a feature that allows clients to find and act on 'stories' about which products and categories have the highest purchaser ratings in networks, local stations and programs.

Web sites: www.wpp.com , www.kantarmedia-audiences.com and www.traglobal.com .