MAM
Kantar Increases creative impact through artificial intelligence
MUMBAI: Kantar, the world’s leading data, insights and consulting company today extends its leadership in Artificial Intelligence (AI) integration into the advertising and creative world with the announcement of four new big data and AI-based solutions. The new offerings will help brands, advertising agencies and media companies more efficiently and accurately build and measure campaigns that have global impact.
The new offerings announced are:
Context Lab: A new platform that creates synergy between creative and media strategies. Context Lab answers the question “How does content perform incrementally better in different media environments?” The platform is flexible enough to optimise elements of a sponsorship, assess the value of branded content, evaluating boutique sites, choose the right creative for the right environments, understand potential for influencer or social performance within a live feed or optimise ad units for the environment in which they’ll run.
Creative Transport: A new toolset capable of forecasting how well creative executions designed for one country will perform if transported to other markets. Kantar combines learning from historical ads and the Link™ database to unleash AI-powered predictive models that guide where to reuse creative and where investment in new creative is needed. In beta testing clients have saved up to 30% in reduced creative production costs.
Balanced Attribution: A new solution that allows marketing leaders to balance short-term sales optimization and long-term brand equity growth. Balanced Attribution allows companies to find the right mix of channels, both online and offline. Built on the experience of over 10,000 brand lift studies and enhanced with AI capabilities from Kantar’s Analytics Practice and sales data from Kantar and our partners help clients optimize their marketing to the ideal balance between upper funnel brand objectives and lower funnel sales.
Enhanced Visual Analytics (EVA): A new online platform that analyses social media imagery at scale to help brand owners understand how their brand and products are being visually represented in broader culture. With almost 100 million images uploaded daily to Instagram alone, Enhanced Visual Analytics is the future of how we understand brands in a culturally connected way, and a critical component in how brands develop and deliver content to consumers. Combining AI and semiotics expertise EVA understands the equity that brands and categories have in culture and helps create great content, track brand equity and understand the opportunities in category ‘white space’.
Discussing the launch of Kantar’s latest suite of AI tools Eric Salama, CEO, Kantar said “At Kantar, we have a longstanding reputation as being the world’s most innovative research and consulting company. Today’s launch illustrates clearly how that innovation delivers meaningful impact for our clients across the whole marketing cycle. From understanding how your brand is perceived and used by consumers in social media, to ensuring investments are repurposed or directed to the right channels through to calculating ROI, it is clear AI is beginning to have a significant impact in the world of marketing”.
Brands
Zscaler, Airtel launch India AI Cyber Research Centre
New hub to boost cyber resilience and trusted AI use
NEW DELHI: As India’s digital engine roars ahead, so do the risks riding shotgun. In response, Zscaler, Inc. and Bharti Airtel have joined hands to launch the AI and Cyber Threat Research Center – India, a national initiative aimed at strengthening the country’s cyber defences and accelerating responsible AI adoption.
The centre is designed as a multi stakeholder platform that brings together industry, government and academia. Its mission is clear: protect critical sectors such as telecom, banking and energy, shield everyday digital users, and future proof India’s fast expanding online ecosystem.
India has long been a major innovation hub for Zscaler, with a substantial portion of its cyber research talent based here. With this new centre, that footprint evolves into a national collaboration engine. The idea is simple but ambitious, build in India, for India, and help power the country’s journey towards a secure and digitally self reliant future.
The timing is telling. India is building digital systems at population scale, not just enterprise scale. That scale has widened the attack surface dramatically. At the same time, cyber criminals and nation state actors are deploying AI to scan, probe and exploit vulnerabilities in minutes.
Zscaler’s research arm, ThreatLabz India, reports millions of infiltration attempts every month. These include espionage campaigns linked to regional geopolitical tensions, 1.2 million intrusion attempts from 20,000 sources targeting 58 Indian digital entities, and a rise in zero day exploit attempts across multiple industries.
In such an environment, perimeter based security models are struggling to keep pace. The new centre aims to push a shift towards secure by design systems and Zero Trust architecture.
Its strategy rests on four pillars: protect through real time intelligence, remediate by working directly with government agencies, facilitate adoption of AI driven security and Zero Trust frameworks, and build a stronger cybersecurity talent pipeline through specialised certifications.
As founding members, Zscaler and Airtel will combine global threat intelligence with local network visibility. Zscaler will deploy a dedicated India focused research team and draw insights from its Zero Trust Exchange platform, which processes over 500 billion daily transactions worldwide. Airtel, meanwhile, will contribute deep visibility into IoT and mobile traffic, helping detect suspicious activity faster and coordinate response across the ecosystem.
Bharti Airtel executive vice chairman Gopal Vittal, said the partnership extends Airtel’s commitment to safeguarding customers and the nation’s digital fabric. He added that the collaboration would address challenges unique to the Indian market and encourage secure and confident digital engagement.
Zscaler chief executive, chairman and founder Jay Chaudhry, said India’s digital ambition cannot be secured with legacy firewalls and VPNs. He noted that a modern Zero Trust architecture is essential for a hyper connected world and that the new centre would harness the scale of Zscaler’s global security cloud while empowering a new generation of Indian cyber defenders.
Additional members from critical public and private sectors are expected to join the initiative in the coming months, expanding its scope and deepening collaboration.
In a world where threats travel at machine speed, India’s answer is to think faster, collaborate wider and build smarter.
