Zuora, the subscription billing and commerce leader, today announced that Kantar Video, a division of WPP, the world leader in advertising and marketing communications services, is powering its new on-demand video analytics platform with Zuora. Kantar Video is a new unit within Kantar, which services 22,000 customers in 50 countries and 3 million brands including 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies providing in-depth data and research.

Kantar Video believes the influx of larger and direct response advertisers will drive global video marketing spend to grow by at least 30% per annum compounded through 2015 reaching at least $15B/year (USD). To address this new market, Kantar Video set forth with an aggressive plan to launch a new platform offering customers integrated media audience measurement, competitive intelligence, and behavioral analytics within a single, on-demand platform that helps track and measure online and mobile video and video advertising worldwide. 

Rapid Time-to-Market Required to Meet Kantar Video's Aggressive Launch Timeline In June 2010, Kantar Video began work on building its new on-demand video platform. With the explosion of elastic cloud computing services and the ever-changing dynamics of the media industry, Kantar Video quickly determined that it needed an on-demand subscription commerce and billing solution. More importantly the solution needed to provide flexible pricing and packaging, out-of-the-box support for usage and metered models, and self-service commerce capabilities to automate online sign-up through the renewals process. 

With rapid go-to-market requirements, Kantar Video recognized that WPP's in-house systems were not designed for multi-tier subscriptions. Longer-term, Kantar Video knew it would need to regularly respond to pricing to globalization, competition, and new products that Kantar Video was planning to introduce. Kantar Video looked towards outside vendors to ensure an on-time launch of its new service.

Complete Subscription Commerce with Self-Service Capabilities Achieved in Months Kantar selected Zuora for its subscription billing needs because Zuora was the only solution that provided enterprise-tested self-service capabilities and support for a broad range of usage models, and a flexible platform to adapt to frequent change, all out of the box Kantar launched its new on-demand video platform just two months later, and signed up more than 60 new subscribers in the first month -- all new customers that prior to Zuora would have been difficult to reach without an online subscription commerce solution. 

In addition, Kantar has launched a series of new campaigns into its existing installed customer base of more than 22,000 customers to drive new subscriptions to its new video platform. 

Now with Zuora, Kantar Video has a flexible, robust subscription commerce platform, including:

• Flexible pricing and packaging for Kantar's subscription plans
• Free trials and the automation of subscriber sign-ups online with self service
• Seamless provisioning and de-provisioning of accounts including change orders, add-on orders, upgrades, and cancellations
• Automated invoice creation and payment processing via PayPal
• Nightly updates to Salesforce with subscription details and metrics
• 100% self-service from online sign-up to subscription to renewals

"While companies look to sell through new channels and innovate on new business models, technology and the lack of a solution to charge for subscription services has hindered their ability to launch new products into new markets," said Kantar Video CEO William A. Lederer. "Zuora has been critical to our success to launch our new video platform in a short period. Without a solution like Zuora, we would likely have spent valuable time and money building this service for our clients and partners."

"The media and on-demand video market is innovating as fast as any industry today," said Tien Tzuo, CEO and co-founder, Zuora. "Companies like Kantar Video, who can master the mechanics of the new subscription economy and innovate their billing models quickly gain a massive advantage over the competition. We are thrilled that we have helped Kantar to deploy quickly to have a strong start and a scalable way forward to tap into this massive opportunity."