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It has appointed Marc O'Regan, head of data at Omnicom agency Proximity London, as director of behavioural insight.

O'Regan will report to Fiona McAnena, development director at Kantar, the group name for WPP's market research properties that include Research International and Millward Brown.

"This is a significant appointment for Kantar," said McAnena. "We can now leverage behavioural and transactional data alongside the established market research data sources, giving us better connections between consumer attitudes and behaviour."

Though O'Regan hails from the DM industry - he spent several years at WWAV Rapp Collins - he also holds the Market Research Society diploma.

He headed a 35-strong data-planning team at Proximity London where he developed customer segmentation and churn models for clients such as O2.

The WPP role would involve "pulling together insight for clients using all WPP resources. O'Regan said. "I'll be looking at opportunities to improve clients' business performance through better insight, from customer satisfaction surveys to database segmentation." Kantar clients include Barclays and BT.

Proximity London has already announced O'Regan's replacement as Julie Screech, former data director at Joshua.

Historically, the disciplines of market research and database marketing have been philosophically distinct, largely due to the Market Research Society's code of conduct forbidding the identification of survey respondents. However, the advent of customer insight managers in client companies has seen the two industries cooperate more closely in recent years.