PERHAPS I was wrong to criticise the ability of Donald Brydon, chairman of Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS), to create shareholder value. Announcing a nil-premium merger of TNS with GfK in April was a masterstroke, but not because that deal, which later fell apart, made any sense.

The deal’s failure awakened the interest of Sir Martin Sorrell at WPP and could yet lead to further consolidation in the market-research sector.

WPP’s £1.1 billion hostile offer for TNS looks more likely to succeed by the day. GfK, meanwhile, is hunting high and low for its own backer, despite saying seven weeks ago it was working on a counter offer “with the involvement of an identified potential source of equity and equity-related financing”.

Assuming GfK ends up empty-handed, the previously fragmented market-research sector begins to look heavily skewed toward two giant players: Nielsen and WPP/TNS.

GfK and Ipsos will be keen to catch up. Market research also appeals to bigger advertising networks. It is growing at a steady 6% a year at a time when media billings are under pressure as economic growth slows. Using the internet to collect data instead of employing people with clipboards cuts costs and brings faster results for clients.

Over at Aegis, the idea of consolidation has not been lost on chief executive Robert Lerwill. Of course, the media buyer has long made a virtue of not involving itself in large-scale deals. Despite the best efforts of Vincent Bolloré, a 30% shareholder and chairman of rival firm Havas, Aegis has stayed out of the clutches of the big marketing networks to become the world’s largest independent buyer of media.

Aegis’s digital arm, Isobar, has been at the sweet spot as advertising money shifts online.

Synovate, which is expected to have grown first-half sales by about 5.7% when Aegis reports on Thursday, has little in common with the rest of the group although it generates more than a third of sales. It should be an easy asset to dislodge.

Shares in the company trade at a slight premium to its agency peers, broadly 11 times future earnings versus nine times, but there should be further for it to go.

Andrew Walsh at Landsbanki reckons there is £960m of equity value locked away in Aegis from its market-research and digital activities. That is 84p a share or 75% of Aegis’s market value – suggesting that much of its main division, the media buyer Carat, is thrown in free.

The question is whether Lerwill can make a bold move to crystallise this value, or Bolloré finally ends his phoney war with a bid and perhaps a break-up. It is certainly something for John Napier, Aegis’s new chairman, to ponder.

Bovis Homes

THERE are two ways to view the housebuilding sector at the moment. The first is to steer clear because there is plenty more pain to come for investors as earnings collapse and dividends are slashed. Certainly, official figures from the Council of Mortgage Lenders show that the sharp decline in housebuying is accelerating.

Even with that in mind, Mike Farley of Persimmon last week proclaimed the housing crisis was reaching the bottom – although he would still like Alistair Darling to intervene with a stamp-duty holiday.

Then there is the second (medium-term) view, which posits that share prices in the sector have fallen too far below asset values.

Grant Daniel at FinnCap points out that shares in Bovis, which reports interim numbers on Tuesday, are a case in point. At 428p, they trade at 43% below asset value, similar to the level they fell to in the early 1990s.

Have land values really fallen so far, so quickly? With 3m new homes on the cards before 2020, it may not be as long as the bears think before builders bounce back into vogue.

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