Kantar announced the formation of Kantar Media, which integrates professional health-research companies PERQ/HCI and MARS Medical, as well as the former TNS Media consumer health-research divisions. The transition completes an integration process begun in 2009 when Kantar acquired TNS Media, SRDS and PERQ/HCI. On the consumer side, Kantar Media’s intelligence unit provides strategic advertising and marketing information from the business unit formerly known as TNS Media Intelligence, as well as digital and social-media intelligence with Compete Cymfony and SRDS. The audiences unit integrates the unit formerly known as TNS Media Research, providing internet, TV and radio audience measurement worldwide, while the TGI & custom units measure consumer product and brand consumption, attitudes and media usage. Kantar Media’s professional health side offers insight on physician media usage, as well as healthcare market intelligence and professional healthcare website audience measurement. Its other professional services include Focus/Media-Chek journal readership research; non-journal audience measurement covering digital and print media; JAR, JARScan, and MORe ad-expenditure tracking and ad-image database; MARS Medical Online web-based analysis and scheduling tool; and custom research capabilities. In October WPP acquired TNS Healthcare and combined it with Consumer Health Sciences, MattsonJack and Ziment to form KantarHealth, an amalgam of the four companies bundling global research with consulting capabilities.
GlaxoSmithKline will slash up to 4,000 sales jobs, mostly in the US and Europe, reported London’s Sunday Times. The paper said the cuts, to be announced with Thursday’s earnings call, come as GSK seeks to shift resources away from established markets, where growth is cooling, to emerging ones where potential is greatest.
