Twitter Buys France’s Mesagraph And UK’s SecondSync To Ramp Up Social TV Efforts In Europe

Twitter is adding more global firepower to its ambitions to cosy up to broadcasters and TV advertisers: it is buying France’s Mesagraph, and it is also acquiring the UK’s SecondSync (a key partner of Facebook’s). It is also expanding its relationship with Kantar, the market analytics firm owned by WPP who was also an investor in SecondSync, as part of its string of announcements today to further its global reach with its social TV strategy.

Mesagraph works with broadcasters in France such as Canal+, France Télévisions, M6, TF1. SecondSync, meanwhile, works primarily in the UK broadcasting industry, where “through our social analytics products, we’ve enabled clients in the broadcast and advertising industries to realise the value of conversations on Twitter about television,” it notes in its announcement.

With both Mesagraph and SecondSync, Twitter is buying infrastructure: instead of building out more relationships in Europe, these two startups have them in place already. In the case of Mesagraph, it involves working with analytics provider Médiamétrie as well as Microsoft and Mediabrands on marketing. “We’ve learned a lot from our partners and really enjoyed being part of their most innovative projects,” the startup notes in its blog post.

In SecondSync, Twitter is doing two things. The first is adding stronger ties within the UK TV industry. The second is perhaps even more interesting: it is nabbing a crucial relationship that Facebook has in social TV — a relationship that was only announced earlier this year.

“On 30th Jan 2014 we announced a partnership with Facebook that extends the reach of our social listening platform to include anonymised interactions from the Facebook platform,” SecondSync notes in its Crunchbase profile. “We’re the only company worldwide with this capability, allowing us to bring social TV analytics from the world’s biggest social network to market. We will launch initially in the UK and USA.”

Terms of the deals were not disclosed but the two acquired companies will be working out of Twitter’s UK office in London. SecondSync says that its existing product will be available for a little while longer, without specifying more details.

The Kantar deal, along with the other news, comes just ahead of the MIPTV conference in Cannes, France, where Twitter has for the past couple of years been growing its presence.

The Kantar deal is not new: the pair had been working together since August 2013 to provide measurement and analytics data in the UK and Spain. Now they are expanding that to the Nordics, Russia, parts of Africa and southeast Asia — to mirror the markets where Twitter collectively has more users than in the U.S.

The partnership is also extending beyond TV content and to a new service that Twitter is calling “Data of Now” that will focus on real-time metadata around advertising, consumer insight, brand equity and media measurement. Effectively, this will sit alongside the TV data to provide a “360-degree” picture of the television and advertising landscape. (And when you think about it, this makes a lot of sense since a lot of the response to TV ads can be delayed but also bolstered well after the initial point of delivery.)

The Kantar relationship will sit alongside existing work that Twitter does with Nielsen in the U.S., Italy and AustraliaVideo Research in Japan and GFK in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.