GroupM has welcomed the first day of spring by announcing the birth of a new product that provides consumer insights gleaned from 30 of the markets in which it operates.

Live Panel is a consumer and media-insight solution that aims to give WPP agencies the ability to precisely target and plan campaigns based on access to data for 5.5 million consumers across 30 markets. The Canadian panel will include 187,000 people.

The panel, which can be used for global and local campaigns, combines data from WPP’s Kantar assets and integrates them with the individual planning tools of its media agencies, which include Mindshare, MEC, MediaCom and Maxus.

Harvey Goldhersz, chief data officer and CEO, GroupM Analytics, tells MiC the panel is the latest evolution of data at the media holding group.

“A few years ago media agencies were thought of as driving awareness and attitude, and those types of softer metrics,” he says. “This allows us to take those behavioural metrics and combine them with consumer insights and more scaled insights about the why behind them.”

The new product includes four Kantar data sources: BrandZ, TGI, Connected Life and Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. Those data sources combine survey, panel and census data to provide a combined data set.

Each Kantar data source provides Live Panel with specific kinds of consumer-based information, which include understand consumer trends, purchase behaviour, ability to measure changes in attitude or behaviour specific to a brand, the ability to understand consumer usage of media, as well as the ability to develop strategies to optimize based on device–usage.

“This will allow us to match across different data samples through a common ID,” says Goldhersz. “So, for example, if we wanted to understand about different consumer trends, we could do that. If we are seeing certain behaviours in retail we could survey those people and understand why they’re behaving that way. It’s about connectivity, and that’s the biggest differentiator.”

With files from Val Maloney