Ad agency Leo Burnett launches data & analytics offering

Communications and advertising company, Leo Burnett, announced the launch of its integrated data and analytics offering, The Core, that will serve as an insight engine to drive competitive advantage for clients. According to the company, the new unit will bring together its existing research and CRM specialties with the proprietary Ardent search technology that the agency acquired in January. “We live in a world where people are telling us what they want through their behavior. We can harness this data and infuse it into our creative communications to make them more personalized, more engaging and more effective. The Core will take the best of digital insight, the best of CRM and the best of human understanding, and link it all together as one powerful offering,” said Andrew Swinand, CEO, North America, Leo Burnett. The company states that The Core will leverage data and analytics to deliver deep consumer insights that lead to highly targeted and personalized creative. The unified offering will also allow teams at Leo Burnett, Arc and Rokkan to tap into its expertise and leverage first-, second-, and third-party data to identify business-building opportunities for clients. Leo Burnett claims that the new team of the data analytics wing will be home to close to 100 data and analytics professionals, including those from Leo Burnett’s Personifi and HumanLab divisions, which will now become part of The Core. Personifi is an analytics team that manages CRM and loyalty programs for clients. It includes statisticians, economists, psychologists and social scientists, and is responsible for billions of CRM-driven brand impressions each year. The HumanLab on the other hand is a quantitative research division that has developed proprietary insight tools and capabilities to support the agency’s HumanKind operating system, including path-to-purchase modeling, segmentation targeting and perceptual mapping of opportunity spaces. As part of The Core, the HumanLab will now be able to connect its work to data management platforms (DMPs) in order to directly link ethnographic segmentation research to clients’ propensity models.