Sydney, Australia – Global insights and consulting company Kantar has announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Blackwood Seven, the AI-enabled marketing ROI firm based in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The integration of Blackwood Seven’s capabilities is expected to bolster Kantar’s marketing ROI analysis expertise. Kantar Australia will be integrating Blackwood Seven’s unified marketing measurement solution powered by Hamilton.AI for a range of uses including budget setting, competitor analysis, reducing customer acquisition cost, and in measuring brand equity and minimising customer churn. The deal is scheduled to be completed by the end of April.
Straford Rodrigues, head of media and marketing effectiveness at Kantar Australia, said that clients need a solution that brings together the insights they need for both strategic and tactical media investment decision-making futureproofed against cookie deprecation.
“I am thrilled to have Unified Marketing Measurement and Optimisation as a new Kantar Analytics solution to answer incremental client questions in the marketing effectiveness space. In this world of increasing media proliferation, there is a critical need among advertisers and marketers to measure effectiveness and ROI at a channel/publisher level for both on and offline media. This solution will help tease out performance effects by the channel at a granular level,” Rodrigues said.
Kantar‘s new marketing effectiveness solution, Unified Marketing Measurement, and Optimisation, learns from the effects of past media investments, modeling a multitude of scenarios to optimize future media plans down to individual publisher levels. Australian businesses can benefit from the offer immediately.
Rodrigues added, “Combining this with our current marketing ROI solutions and global analytics expertise means we can quickly scale our sophisticated marketing effectiveness offer benefiting a greater number of Australian clients.”
Meanwhile, Kantar Australia’s head of analytics John Cucka said the practice has seen tremendous growth since launching in 2019.
“The Athena platform evaluates long-term brand contributions and the Hamilton.AI platform will integrate touchpoint modelling into traditional marketing mix modelling, giving a portfolio that delivers across marketing decision-making needs.”
