Sydney, Australia – Financial literacy is much more within reach today with the digital world giving way to a platform where expert content lands freely in the hands of the general audience. However, in Australia, the majority of consumers, or 76%, don’t believe that financial service brands are working hard enough to educate them on financial matters.

The data, gleaned from the latest study by Kantar Australia, also showed that 45% of Aussies want to be more financially confident, an increase of 8% from 2021. Meanwhile, there have been fewer who claim they are more financially knowledgeable (27%) than others, a 33% decrease from last year. 

In the present inflationary environment where 55% of Aussies are negative about the country’s economy, consumers are putting a greater preference for brands that help them take control of their finances (44%), up by 8%. 

“We know that wealth determines health more than ever before and achieving financial autonomy has never been more complex. Finance goals and life goals are strongly interlinked, and as more Australians reassess their lives, this research clearly reveals the gap between knowledge and decisions. Australians are dreaming of financial independence but there’s a disparity with current realities,” commented Anagha Kanhere, Kantar Australia’s Financial Services lead.

Furthermore, the research revealed that over 2 in 5 Australians wish to be financially independent in five years and think they need at least $1m to retire ‘comfortably’. This rises to 2 in 3 Gen Z and Millennials who think they need at least $2m or more.

Kanhere added, “The overwhelming lack of confidence in brands providing financial education is compounded by the 42% who feel brands don’t make information easy to understand either. This provides an enormous opportunity for brands to support and build trust with Australians.”

Australia Consulting company Kantar Australia has announced that it is combining the ‘insights and consulting’ divisions in Australia through formal structural integration. 

Turbocharging its ability to drive insight into growth context, and bridge the languages of research, marketing and growth, this announcement marks a realisation of opportunity through structural evolution and propels the company’s combined offer to be unrivalled in the Australian market.

Managing Director Jon Foged of Kantar Australia says, “While we have long collaborated on projects and clients, we have been in steadfast planning towards the invaluable opportunity of fully aligning Kantar Insights and Kantar Consulting as one unified team in Australia. This is an incredibly exciting transformation. The combined pool of world class consulting talent who deeply understand marketing’s evolving role in driving growth is meeting world class researchers with the expertise, tools, global scale and unrivalled benchmarking. We think it’s a game changing and unique proposition in this market.”

Foged added that through this integration, Kantar can turbocharge the innovation and brand strategy domains, as well as adding a cultural insight and futures capability, and world class growth strategy thinking across everything they do. “Ultimately, it is all about giving our clients the right balance of responsiveness with capacity and scaled capability,” said Foged.

Kantar Australia’s Managing Partner of Consulting Dennis Wong adds that the union will amplify and deliver growth in uncomfortable places for Australian clients,

“The market is filled with buoyant opportunities, but in highly competitive markets such as Australia, growth is harder to find than ever before with a totally different backdrop of consumer and market dynamics.”

According to Wong, brands are increasingly trying to do more with less, but at scale. That this requires reframing opportunity, yet retaining ability to deploy at scale. Wong also added that the complexity of the client problems requires genuinely actionable solutions solved and embedded by teams that can cut across silos by linking the languages of insight with those of marketing and growth. “By coming together, our combined expertise will ensure our clients can see it, shape it and do it. By this I mean see the growth beyond categories, but well into the future through the lens of culture. They can shape a compelling offer through portfolio, brand, customer experience and innovation, and not only drive strategy into action but measure against the growth opportunities in ways empathetic to the capability of the business,” added Wong.

Tracey Forbes head of marketing transformation at Diageo Australia says the combined offer has already had immediate impact on clients, “the coming together of Kantar’s Consulting and Insights team has brought greater value to the Diageo Australia business than ever before. It means we can join the dots up, down and across our teams to link the future facing, big picture strategies we build together through to what we see in measurement and everything in between.”

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.”