Kantar Media acquires Singapore-based FishEye Analytics

The integration of FishEye Analytics, a Singapore-based start-up that tracks both social and traditional media, should extend Kantar Media’s global multi-lingual social measurement and analysis capabilities.

This follows Kantar Media’s acquisition of Chinese social insight expert CIC in 2012. Andy Brown, the firm’s global CEO, said the development of "social business" in Asia is a strategic priority and both acquisitions complement its existing services.

The APAC region has nearly 800 million social media users, representing 64 per cent of the total 1.2 billion internet users across the 18 countries.

Sam Flemming, founder and CEO of CIC, added that the new acquisition responds to increasing requests from clients for consistency in social listening across geographies, but with "necessary local context, depth and granularity”.

Founded in 2009 in Singapore with an R&D centre in Hyderabad, FishEye Analytics developed a technology that collects and analyses online discussions in 67 languages, thanks to proprietary neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and text mining features. This was a pioneer in Asia, according to Ashwin Reddy Gayam, co-founder and CEO of FishEye Analytics.