Fox Audience Network (FAN), a division of News Corporation, and WPP (NASDAQ:WPPGY) today announced a partnership to provide marketers with more accurate and in-depth information to increase the effectiveness of their digital marketing investments.

FAN will work with units of WPP’s Kantar and WPP Digital under the terms of the new partnership. These collaborations will provide marketers with better insight across inventory aggregated by both FAN and the Media Innovation Group of WPP Digital.

WPP companies will gain access to FAN's Audience Segmentation service to enrich their insights, planning and measurement offerings. The enhanced audience segmentation services will enable WPP clients to understand and reach highly customized yet anonymous groups of consumers who share relevant interests, such as autos, games, movies or music. In addition, FAN will gain access to deep consumer insights from Kantar, the research arm of WPP, broadening the information available in its Audience Segmentation platform.

“There is more data than most online marketers know what to do with but not enough insight or action,” said Mark Read, CEO of WPP Digital. “We are delighted to be working with FAN to integrate Audience Insights into the various WPP platforms, extending FAN's analytics across more publishers and more channels, online and offline, than ever before.”

“In working with WPP, we gain a valuable partner as we extend our Audience Insights platform, which already covers more than 80% of online consumers in the U.S., into the most comprehensive audience analytics service in the industry,” said Adam Bain, President of Fox Audience Network. “Together, we will create new insights for marketers about who is visiting their digital properties and how particular audience segments are responding to marketing messages.”

Specifically the partnership includes the following:

• Compete, a division of Kantar Media, will integrate enhanced features from FAN’s Audience Insights platform into its Compete PRO offering, the leading online measurement and digital intelligence service (found at www.compete.com).
• WPP Digital's Media Innovation Group will incorporate elements of the FAN media planning suite into ZAP, its proprietary digital advertising platform.
• FAN will aggregate additional retail and other information on an anonymous basis from Kantar Media into its Audience Insights platform to provide more robust audience segments to advertisers.

About WPP

WPP is the world’s largest communications services group. Through its operating companies, the Group provides a comprehensive range of advertising and marketing services including advertising; media investment management; information, insight and consultancy; public relations and public affairs; branding and identity; healthcare communications; direct, digital, promotion and relationship marketing and specialist communications. The company employs 145,000 people (including associates) in 2,400 offices in 107 countries. For more information, visit www.wpp.com.

About FAN

The Fox Audience Network (FAN) is a unit of News Corporation that supports monetization efforts across the company’s online content portfolio, as well as third-party publisher sites. FAN leverages proprietary advertising technology to create highly-targeted advertising campaigns for a wide range of marketers, while also delivering cutting-edge tools and services to third-party publisher partners, advertising agencies and research companies. FAN works directly with hundreds of advertisers to develop customized marketing programs that optimize both branded and performance-based strategies. The company also developed and manages a self-serve advertising platform, which is currently utilized by more than 30,000 advertisers. In all, FAN reaches more than 158 million consumers each month* and owns partnerships with more than 700 online publishers.

*Source: comScore Media Metrix, September 2009