Kantar launches AI Lab

Kantar has announced the launch of Kantar AI Lab, unifying the company’s AI teams across its entire portfolio. This new Centre of Expertise for the development of AI technologies, products and collaborations embeds AI across every element of Kantar’s portfolio. It is a strategy that will disrupt the insights industry at scale, adding Kantar’s AI capabilities to its people expertise and data scale to give clients an enhanced experience.

The new Kantar AI Lab includes:

• Kantar AI Assistant (KaiA): A conversational generative AI assistant that marketers can interrogate data with more intuitively, simply by asking questions. KaiA connects proprietary data, models, and analytical frameworks to generate insights in seconds and is initially available for clients of Kantar’s Brand Tracking services. Integrations with more Kantar data sets will follow.
• Text AI: 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. Deeper insights can be derived using more conversational questions.
• LIFT ROI: A unified marketing measurement platform that empowers users to measure, predict and inform media decisions, including optimising campaigns across media. The AI-driven modelling engine will include a new feature integrating LINK AI data to determine the impact of creative quality on the effectiveness of media exposure – a key question from advertisers across the industry (coming soon).
• LINK AI Creative Insights: Integrated within LIFT and combining creative and media effectiveness measurement for video to empower brands to take media planning decisions holistically (coming soon).
• Predicted brand lift feature into LINK+ digital creative testing: A new hybrid measure that will predict an ad’s impact on brand awareness, consideration and purchase intent across digital advertising. This marks an industry shift to forecast digital impact prior to launch.
• Automated creative tagging for ads tested with LINK AI: Advertisers will be able to track how their campaigns comply with channel or brand guidelines, alongside LINK AI’s creative effectiveness metrics. This combination enables deeper meta-analyses to understand which creative elements best drive their – and their clients’ – targeted outcomes (launching in July).
• 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. With brands under pressure to make ads memorable and spend more impactful, identifying creative executions that can cross borders will save time, maximise ad ROI and give advertisers the confidence to re-deploy campaigns internationally (launching in July).
• ConceptEvaluate AI: A new tool trained on Kantar’s extensive innovation database designed to give brands accurate predictions of in-market success on their concept potential to fast-track time to market and hence cost-effectiveness. The tool reduces risk in the innovation process by providing early feedback for up to 100 concepts and identifies higher-performing concepts to advance to in-depth testing (available from mid-July).

Ashok Kalidas, Kantar’s newly appointed Global Chief AI Scientist that in data collection, “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.”

In Australia, John Cucka, Head of Analytics and AI for Kantar Australia says that while Kantar globally has been leveraging automation systems for decades, the benefits of increased investment over the last 5-10 years has yielded a great number of tools that have gone largely unnoticed.

“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.”

Cucka adds, “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.