Under the deal with the British market research company, CIC will be working with other Kantar Media partnerships in China including CSM and CTR. Financial details of the acquisition are undisclosed.
This comes on the back of growing needs for real-time monitoring of consumer-brand conversations in a market where 70 per cent of the internet user base is on social media and over 50,000 enterprises own a microblog account.
Founded in 2004 with offices in Shanghai and Beijing, CIC coined the now standard industry term 'Internet Word of Mouth (IWOM)' and pioneered the concept of social business in China. With a team of over 60 social media consultants, CIC has led the industry in social media intelligence with technologies such as Chinese-language text mining.
Sam Flemming, founder and chairman of CIC, commented, “In joining Kantar Media, we will identify synergies between our data set – an archive of over 3 billion consumer brand mentions – and Kantar Media’s vast data resources."
The CIC team will remain based in Shanghai and Beijing, and its management will report to Jean-Michel Portier, global CEO of Kantar Media.
Portier said, “CIC will enrich our global digital expertise in capturing millions of online conversations and make sense of the buzz in order to provide interpretation that informs strategic decisions and leads to action.”
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