Kantar Media exits Kantar Group and relaunches as Fifty5Blue
Kantar Media today rebrands as Fifty5Blue after its H.I.G. Capital acquisition, signaling full independence and a push into hybrid audience measurement across 80+ countries.
Data
Kantar Media today announced it is rebranding as Fifty5Blue, completing its operational separation from the broader Kantar Group following the company's acquisition by private equity firm H.I.G. Capital in August 2025. The announcement, made from London on 25 February 2026, marks the most visible step yet in the organisation's transition to a fully standalone business, with a new name, a new visual identity and a sharpened strategic focus on hybrid audience measurement.
The rebrand is not a cosmetic exercise. According to the company, Fifty5Blue will operate as an independent entity in more than 80 countries, pursuing what it describes as a model that fuses high-quality panel data with large-scale big data. The combination - panels for rigour, big data for scale - has become something of a defining formula in modern audience measurement, and Fifty5Blue's announcement positions the company squarely in the middle of an intensely contested space where Nielsen, Comscore and a growing number of specialist platforms all compete for the same advertiser budgets.
Patrick Béhar, the company's Global CEO, framed the new identity in terms of simplification rather than expansion. "In a world full of noise, with no shortage of data, we believe clarity is the real differentiator. Our role is to remove unnecessary complexity, provide the right data with the most rigorous methods and help our clients gain the clarity to make better decisions," he said in the announcement. The statement is a deliberate positioning play. In a data-saturated market, the promise of clarity - of cutting through signal noise rather than adding to it - is increasingly what measurement companies are selling.
The separation from Kantar Group
H.I.G. Capital completed its acquisition of Kantar Media in August 2025, carving the audience measurement division away from WPP-owned Kantar Group, which retained other research and insight businesses. The split had been anticipated since WPP began restructuring Kantar several years ago, selling a majority stake to Bain Capital in 2019, and then gradually divesting specialist units. The Kantar Media divestiture to H.I.G. Capital represented one of the later chapters of that broader reorganisation.
According to the company, the past year under independent ownership has involved significant investment across three areas: people, technology and partnerships. Béhar noted that the private equity structure created room for faster decision-making. "We have embraced the freedom to move faster, sharpen our focus and invest for the long-term, while remaining anchored in the independence, rigour and transparency that have always defined our organisation and our audience measurement solutions globally," he said.
Independence is a word Fifty5Blue returns to repeatedly, and not by accident. Audience measurement has long been caught in a structural tension: the companies that measure media effectiveness are often commercially intertwined with the platforms and broadcasters whose performance they assess. The Barb and Kantar Media dispute with YouTube over TV measurement - where Google sent cease and desist letters to both organisations citing terms of service violations - illustrated precisely how fragile that independence can be when large platforms disagree with methodologies. For Fifty5Blue, independence from Kantar Group - and the commercial relationships that implied - is both a structural fact and a marketing proposition.
The hybrid measurement model
At the technical core of Fifty5Blue's offering is the hybrid measurement approach. According to the company, this involves combining panel-based data collection - where sample populations are recruited, metered and tracked - with large-scale big data drawn from set-top boxes, smart TV automatic content recognition and other passive data sources. The logic is straightforward: panels provide the demographic depth and single-source behavioural data that big data alone cannot supply, while big data provides the geographic and channel coverage that panels, by their limited size, cannot achieve.
This hybrid architecture is not unique to Fifty5Blue. Barb, the UK television measurement authority, uses a comparable methodology, integrating people-based panel data from more than 5,000 homes with census-level online viewing data. Nielsen's Big Data + Panel methodology follows a similar logic, combining large-scale automatic content recognition data with its national panel infrastructure. The fact that Fifty5Blue is doubling down on this approach reflects a broader industry consensus that neither methodology alone is sufficient in a world where audiences are fragmented across linear television, streaming, connected TV and social platforms.
The challenge of audience fragmentation is one that the entire advertising measurement industry is grappling with. Kantar's forecasting for 2026 highlighted growing fragmentation as a central strategic concern for marketers, noting that coherent cross-channel ideas are 2.5 times more important to campaign success than they were a decade ago. Fifty5Blue's pitch - that its hybrid model can deliver consistent currency across fragmented environments - speaks directly to that concern.
The company also pointed to three established product lines that remain within the new portfolio: Ibope, the Latin American audience measurement operation; TGI, the Target Group Index consumer research database; and TechEdge, which provides media monitoring and competitive intelligence. These businesses, according to Fifty5Blue, will continue to evolve and scale within the new structure rather than being spun off or wound down.
AI investment and the full advertising funnel
Beyond hybrid measurement, Fifty5Blue flagged a significant acceleration in its investment in artificial intelligence - specifically for tools designed to cover the full advertising funnel. According to the announcement, the company is building a new generation of tools that make it easier to query Fifty5Blue's proprietary real-time data, and is applying AI to generate insights across awareness, consideration and conversion stages.
Béhar's framing of AI was notably cautious in one respect. Rather than positioning artificial intelligence as a replacement for human-generated data, he described it as reinforcing the value of existing datasets. "AI fundamentally reinforces the importance of our single-source datasets, which are based on direct observation of what real people watch," he said. The reference to single-source data - panels where individual respondents have their full media consumption tracked across devices - is significant. Single-source data is considered the gold standard in cross-media measurement precisely because it avoids the attribution ambiguities that arise when panel data and passive big data are stitched together from separate sources.
The wider industry context here is competitive. Nielsen's Outcomes Marketplace, launched with a Realeyes partnership in mid-2025, also applies AI-driven analysis to connect attention metrics with business outcomes across campaign types. The measurement landscape is shifting from a world where companies competed on data coverage to one where the differentiator is analytical intelligence - how well a provider can translate raw data into actionable decisions.
Uber Advertising's attention measurement integration with Adelaide and Kantar in October 2025 - still operating under the Kantar brand at that point - illustrated the kind of applied measurement work that now sits within Fifty5Blue's portfolio. That project, which produced a custom attention model by combining Kantar brand lift data with Adelaide's predictive attention methodology, showed performance benchmarks on JourneyTV that were 11% higher than average tablet video standards and 41% higher than mobile video benchmarks on Journey Video Ads.
A refreshed visual identity and global positioning
Fifty5Blue's visual rebrand - described in the announcement as reflecting values of clarity, focus and confidence - is being rolled out globally from today. The name itself carries deliberate connotations: the "55" references a statistical concept associated with audience panel methodology, while "Blue" connects to the colour palette that has traditionally anchored the Kantar Media brand. Whether the name resonates with the company's client base of advertisers, agencies, broadcasters and social platforms will become clearer over coming months as the rebrand is absorbed into day-to-day commercial relationships.
The company operates in more than 80 countries, making it one of the largest audience measurement operations globally by geographic reach. Its data is positioned as a "trusted currency" - a phrase specific to media measurement that means independently verified data accepted by buyers and sellers as the basis for commercial transactions. Television ratings operating as a currency is the traditional model; extending that concept to digital and cross-media environments, where multiple competing methodologies coexist, is the more difficult task Fifty5Blue is attempting.
For marketing professionals who work with media planning and buying, the rebrand matters less as a name change and more as a signal of strategic intent. Kantar Media's separation from Kantar Group removes a potential source of conflict-of-interest concern that some clients harboured when the measurement company sat alongside Kantar's consulting and media planning businesses. The Kantar TikTok Brand Lift partnership, formalised in 2024, and the broader role Kantar played as a YouTube measurement partner via Ads Data Hub are now inherited by Fifty5Blue. How those platform relationships evolve under new ownership and branding will be closely watched.
The announcement also carries implications for the competitive dynamics of the measurement industry more broadly. The Media Rating Council released draft transparency standards for digital advertising auctions in September 2025, encouraging third-party measurement and independent verification across all auction systems. Fifty5Blue's positioning as an independent measurement currency - emphasising its distance from any platform commercial interest - aligns with the direction that industry bodies are pushing measurement standards.
Timeline
- 2019: WPP sells majority stake in Kantar to Bain Capital, beginning the long-term restructuring of Kantar's business units.
- February 2024: Barb launches YouTube channel measurement service using Kantar Media audio-matching technology - described as a world first for YouTube measurement on television sets. PPC Land coverage
- April 2024: Kantar earns formal recognition as a TikTok Measurement Partner for Brand Lift Studies.
- July 2024: Google updates DV360 to expand third-party measurement options, listing Kantar among supported reach and brand lift vendors. PPC Land coverage
- August 2025: H.I.G. Capital completes acquisition of Kantar Media from Kantar Group, creating a standalone measurement business under private equity ownership.
- October 2025: Uber Advertising launches a custom attention metric in partnership with Adelaide and Kantar, producing performance results above industry video benchmarks. PPC Land coverage
- November 2025: Kantar publishes its ten marketing trends for 2026, highlighting audience fragmentation and AI adoption as critical strategic concerns.
- January 2026: YouTube forces Barb and Kantar Media to suspend their UK TV measurement service following cease and desist letters citing terms of service violations. PPC Land coverage
- 25 February 2026: Kantar Media today announces its rebrand as Fifty5Blue, completing the visual and operational separation from Kantar Group and formally launching as an independent audience measurement company in 80+ countries.
Summary
Who: Kantar Media, a global audience measurement company acquired by H.I.G. Capital in August 2025, with Patrick Béhar serving as Global CEO.
What: The company today rebranded as Fifty5Blue, adopting a new name, new visual identity and formally completing its separation from Kantar Group. The rebrand also signals a strategic acceleration in hybrid measurement - combining panels and big data - and in AI-powered analytical tools for the full advertising funnel. Established products including Ibope, TGI and TechEdge remain within the portfolio.
When: The announcement was made on 25 February 2026, following the H.I.G. Capital acquisition concluded in August 2025.
Where: The company is headquartered in London and operates in more than 80 countries worldwide.
Why: The rebrand marks the conclusion of a structural separation that began when H.I.G. Capital acquired Kantar Media from Kantar Group. Under independent ownership, the company sought to distinguish itself from its former parent's consulting and research businesses and to signal a faster pace of investment in technology, AI and partnerships. The new brand is designed to reinforce the company's positioning as an independent, neutral measurement currency - a commercial differentiator at a time when advertiser demand for transparent, conflict-free measurement is rising.