Global Blackwood Seven acquisition delivers AI powered marketing ROI measurement to Australian clients

Sydney: 28 April 2022: Kantar Australia is scaling up its marketing effectiveness offer with the integration of Blackwood Seven’s AI-powered unified marketing measurement solution. The global Kantar business has announced this week that it has reached an agreement to acquire Blackwood Seven, the world-class AI-enabled marketing ROI firm based in Copenhagen, Denmark. The transaction is expected to close at the end of April.

The integration of Blackwood Seven’s capabilities will bolster Kantar’s well-established marketing ROI analysis expertise. 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, measuring brand equity and minimising customer churn cements Kantar’s position as a leader in marketing effectiveness.

Kantar Australia Head of Media and Marketing Effectiveness Straford Rodrigues says, “We know our clients need a solution that bring 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 channel at a granular level.

“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.”

Kantar Australia Head of Analytics John Cucka says the practice has seen tremendous growth since launching in 2019.

“We’ve leveraged our data engineering, statistical forecasting and strategic consulting capabilities into a $100 million USD business globally with over 1,500 employees. Connecting custom, primary research with media data, sales data, customer data, search and social data and more, we’ve built platforms and capabilities to power consulting that answers our clients’ burning questions using all the information they have available.”

“It’s an incredibly exciting growth journey to be a part of,” adds Cucka.

“Our Athena platform evaluates long-term brand contributions and the Hamilton.AI platform will integrate touchpoint modelling into traditional marketing mix modelling, giving us a world-first portfolio that delivers across marketing decision-making needs. It’s a game changer for the Australian market and something we’re thrilled to be showcasing.”

Kantar’s new marketing effectiveness solution – Unified Marketing Measurement and Optimisation – learns from the effects of past media investments, modelling a multitude of scenarios to optimise future media plans down to individual publisher level. Australian businesses can benefit from the offer immediately.

Kantar Australia’s marketing effectiveness and analytics experts help clients maximise the ROI of their marketing budgets by driving sales growth today and creating demand for tomorrow. Where human expertise, AI-powered analytics and technology converge to predict consumer behaviour and optimise priorities for growth. Kantar unifies a global network of data scientists, analytics consultants, technologists and data designers to integrate unique consumer insights with client customer data and a broad range of third-party sources. By combining behavioural and attitudinal data, the outcome is actionable customer analysis to inform every brand, marketing and sales decision.

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