Sydney, Australia – Kantar, a marketing and data analytics firm, has recently announced the inauguration of its AI Lab, integrating its AI teams across its full range of services. This new Centre of Expertise for the development of AI technologies, products, and collaborations embeds AI throughout all elements of Kantar’s portfolio.
It also promises to significantly disrupt the insights industry by leveraging the AI capabilities of the company alongside its people expertise and vast data resources, thereby enhancing client experiences.
Among the core features of the lab are a Kantar AI assistant, with which marketers can interrogate data more intuitively, simply by asking questions. This feature connects proprietary data, models, and analytical frameworks to generate insights in seconds and is initially available for clients of Kantar’s brand tracking services.
It also has a new proprietary Gen AI-based approach to analyse thousands of open-ended survey responses at scale by identifying, grouping, and understanding common patterns in large bodies of text-based responses while maintaining data privacy and security standards.
Furthermore, a unified marketing measurement platform titled LIFT ROI will also empower users to measure, predict, and inform media decisions, including optimising campaigns across media.
Along with these innovations, the lab also offers LINK AI creative insights. This feature is integrated within LIFT and combines creative and media effectiveness measurement for video to empower brands to take media planning decisions holistically.
In addition, it also provides a predicted brand lift feature into LINK+ digital creative testing, automated creative tagging for ads tested with LINK AI, and a hybrid market transfer feature within LINK AI, providing AI-based predictions of ad performance in secondary markets based on LINK+ results from the primary market.
Lastly, a new tool trained on Kantar’s extensive innovation database is designed to give brands accurate predictions of in-market success based on their concept’s potential to fast-track time to market and hence cost-effectiveness.
Ashok Kalidas, global chief AI scientist at Kantar, said, “We’re focused on the impact that AI can have in enhancing fraud prevention, the role of synthetic data, and fast and flexible data sourcing. For clients, our work is enabling everything from data connectivity to campaign optimisation, pushing the boundaries of how we understand people, and help shape the brands of tomorrow.”
John Cucka, head of analytics and AI at Kantar Australia, “Streamlining our processes, improving data quality, and maintaining cost control for our clients aren’t the sexy news businesses usually shout about. The launch of AI Lab is an opportunity to shout about the new AI tools we’ve developed that are getting into our client’s hands.”
“Leveraging our world-leading frameworks, proprietary databases, and an army of data science, statistics, and technology experts, we’ve developed tools across the entire marketing landscape based on world-leading technologies. The depth and breadth of our AI-powered portfolio are like nothing else available in Australia. Whether the need is in creative, media, innovation, or branding, AI-powered tools now exist from idea generation through to testing, refinement, optimisation, and forecasting,” he further continued.
“This is just the beginning of the AI evolution of the industry. As we can continue to train up our AI agents, speed and quality will continue to rise, and accessibility will continue to open. AI is fundamentally changing how we work, but it’s not replacing humans. It is freeing up our incredibly talented and experienced team to focus on leveraging the tools to our client’s advantage, generating better insights to ultimately drive better strategic and tactical decision-making,” concluded Cucka.
