Dentsu Aegis Network India launches proprietary tool ‘DAN Explore’

Dentsu Aegis Network’s Data Sciences Team announced the global roll out of a first-of-its-kind tool that captures the trend of changing audience behaviour and understands the nuances of various consumer cohorts across media touchpoints, backed by behavioural triggers and psychographic understanding – DAN Explore. The aim of DAN Explore is to paint a much more detailed and nuanced portrait of consumers than has been available to date. The tool is not only meant to bolster media and communication strategies for the network’s clients but also to inspire creative themes. It is presently being launched in full force and will be used for all clients of the Dentsu Aegis Network in India.

The tool will be a first in the market that examines differences in media consumption habits across TV, Digital, Out of Home, Mobile and other touchpoints in the consumer’s journey to help marketers combat the challenge to determine when, where and how best to reach their audiences. Making use of proprietary data, agency partnerships and the sophistication of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence – DAN Explore makes the painting of an audience profile far richer and a lot more unified.

Commenting on the launch, Gautam Mehra, the South Asia Chief Data Officer of Dentsu Aegis Network says, “With data and smartphone prices being more ubiquitous, India has seen a distortion in the traditional path to purchase of the digitized consumer. While traditionally there have been challenges in brands understanding nuances in audience traits of the various subsets of their consumers, the growing needs of clients and brand strategists alike have inspired us to probe further in assuming ways to extracting these rich insights. The influence of sophisticated techniques like Artificial Intelligence, on the backbone of heightened processing capabilities has now made deeper understanding of audiences across various touchpoints very real. Through our access of deep rooted APIs with our partners in traditional and new media, and our proprietary data sources, we have endeavoured to decode audience behaviours across various platforms to capture a unified audience view to solve brand challenges.”

DAN Explore condenses and analyses audience behaviour from a multitude of sources related to search, audience psychography, video, purchase intent, appographic and web browsing - with AI assisted guidance that translates a simple brief to inputs for the various sources of data to provide a single audience portrait. In a first in the industry, the tool serves as a starting point for both creative and media teams to plan and execute Audience based strategies.

“There have been two ‘fights’ in the communications business, one that’s been around for a couple of decades now and the other of more recent making. The first is between media and creative. The separation of these two components has resulted in a gap in how a media planner sees the audience and how a brand planner sees the consumer. The second is between Big Data and creative. What we seem to have forgotten in all these ‘fights’ is that everything we do is in the interest of best matching consumers and brands. What that requires is a connecting of the dots so that we understand people as people—not only as consumers of media or brands. DAN Explore opens up countless ways to connect the dots precisely because it collects all kinds of dots about people and their lives. From passion points to brand and media consumption, from offline to online behaviour, from individual to group affinities. In doing so, it does what data is supposed to do in the first place – help explore and find unexpected, inspiring insights”, adds Narayan Devanathan, Group Executive and Strategy Officer at Dentsu Brand Agencies, South Asia.
The tool is also integrated with Dentsu’s proprietary data sources like SVG|Columbus’ app inventory and M1 Panel.