BrazilBain launches new digital products business: Bain Media Lab
Bain & Company has established a new digital products and related services business – Bain Media Lab, with its foundation launch of an advertising analytics tool for the television market to be rolled out in various geographies over the coming year.
Global strategy and management consultancy Bain & Company has announced the launch of a new business – Bain Media Lab – with full-stack deep-learning firm Hive aboard as a launch partner. Together, the two companies have developed founding product Mensio, an AI-powered analytics platform which brings ‘digital-like’ measurement and insight to traditional television advertising and sponsorships.
“Our partnership with Hive is the result of an extensive evaluation of the landscape and our resulting conviction that together we can uniquely create truly differentiated solutions,” said Dan Calpin, leader of Bain’s new Media Lab. “Our launch product, Mensio, unlocks the speed and granularity of data for TV advertising and sponsorships that marketers have come to expect from their digital ad spend.”
According to Calpin, Mensio will enable marketers and their agencies to transition from post-mortem analysis of TV ad spend to real-time optimisation, giving “network owners long-elusive data that can help them recast the narrative on advertising.” As a subscription service, the Mensio platform features a cloud-based dashboard that provides point-and-click reporting for the buyers and sellers of TV advertising and sponsorships.
“As digital marketing has continued to grow its share of advertising dollars, marketers have become accustomed to seeing real-time campaign performance data with granular measurement of audience reach and outcomes,” the firm stated in a press release. “This dynamic has added pressure on television network owners to source comparable data to defend their share of marketers’ advertising budgets.”
Built on Hive’s computer vision models, select features of the Mensio platform include; the measurement of exposure to a brand’s TV advertisements for a given population, both total and broken down by segments; the evaluation of the impact of exposure to TV advertising and sponsorships on a broad set of outcomes such as online activity and store visitation; and competitive intelligence for brands and networks as measured against competitors.
“We are excited to partner with Bain & Company as the launch partner of Bain Media Lab,” said Kevin Guo, co-founder and CEO of Hive AI. “In jointly developing Mensio, we have blended the distinctive competencies of our two firms into a seamlessly integrated go-to-market offering. Hive’s ambition is to leverage artificial intelligence in practical applications to transform industries, and Mensio is our flagship product in the media space.”
With Bain and Hive collaborating on additional products, the computer vision modelling underpinning Mensio enriches recorded television content with metadata, including the identification of commercials and sponsorship placements, as well as contextual elements such as ‘beach scenes’ for example – with the second-by-second viewership data derived from satellite set-top boxes and Smart TVs, and then matched to online and other datasets.
Taking the new product out for a spin, Bain this year monitored celebrity screen time at the Oscars, with Lady Gaga clocking in at 5 minutes and 21 seconds through acceptance speeches and camera shots to claim the top spot – followed by Alfonso Cuarón and Olivia Colman. With Hive’s computer vision and AI placing more than 1 billion tags of metadata on television content daily, such technology can be used to easily track a brand’s overall exposure.
Elizabeth Spaulding, Bain’s global Digital practice co-lead, commented; “Today’s milestone launch exemplifies our strategy to deepen select Bain Innovation Exchange relationships through the formation of new businesses like Bain Media Lab, which will pair Bain’s expertise with best-in-class innovation to create disruptive solutions. It will also be a powerful vehicle to dramatically accelerate the visibility and growth of innovative technology companies like Hive.”
