Cannes, 17 June 2024, 7:00am CET: Kantar, the world’s leading marketing data and analytics company today introduces Kantar AI Lab, led by Chief AI Scientist Ashok Kalidas. Unifying Kantar’s AI strategy and engineering teams across the entire portfolio, the Lab goes public today with the introduction of KaiA, Kantar’s new GenAI marketing assistant and a strategy to disrupt the research industry at scale.
As the Centre of Expertise for the development of AI technologies, products and collaborations, the Lab is embedding AI technology across every element of Kantar’s portfolio and value chain. For the first time today, Kantar announces:
- Kantar AI Assistant (KaiA): a conversational generative AI assistant with which marketers can interrogate data 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 throughout the second half of 2024 and beyond.
- Text AI, a new proprietary GenAI-based approach to analyse thousands of open-ended survey responses at scale. Deeper insights can be derived using more conversational questions. Text AI helps identify, group and understand common patterns in large bodies of text-based responses while maintaining data privacy and security standards.
- The launch LIFT ROI unified marketing features. These will enable users to measure, predict and inform decisions to optimise campaigns across media and marketing. In the second half of 2024 this will include a new feature integrating LIFT ROI and LINK AI data to determine the impact of creative quality on the effectiveness of media exposure, a key question from advertisers across the industry.
- The integration of LINK AI Creative Insights within LIFT, combining creative and media effectiveness measurement for video. Already available in North America and launching globally in H2, this will empower brands to take media planning decisions holistically.
- The integration of a new predicted brand lift feature into LINK+ digital creative testing, available from 25 June. This new hybrid measure will predict an advert’s impact on brand awareness, consideration and purchase intent across digital advertising. This marks an industry shift, enabling advertisers to forecast digital impact prior to launch.
- The addition of automated creative tagging for adverts tested with LINK AI, available from July. 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 so advertisers can understand which creative elements best drive their – and their clients’ – targeted outcomes.
- A hybrid market transfer feature within LINK AI launching in July, 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 redeploy campaigns internationally.
- ConceptEvaluate AI, a new tool trained on Kantar’s extensive innovation database, available from mid-July. Designed to give brands accurate predictions of in-market success on their concept potential it fast-tracks time to market and 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.
Ted Prince, Kantar’s Chief Product Officer said: “Kantar has been leading in AI and advanced analytics for many years, allowing us to go further and faster for our clients and unlock new insights that shape their brands. Kantar’s AI Lab is pushing our leadership a step further with a suite of tools that is making our research more effective, enabling deeper insights, and is offering new AI-led research applications that will transform the relationship between brands and consumers.”
Ashok Kalidas, Kantar’s newly announced Chief AI Scientist, added: “We are building an AI strategy to disrupt our industry at scale, merging our AI capabilities with the expertise of our people and the scale of our data to give our clients an enhanced experience. In data collection, we are focused on the impact 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.”
More information on Kantar’s AI strategy is available at kantar.com.