Unruly partners MediaCom to gain cultural insights of global consumers

News Corp-owned Unruly has tied up with MediaCom over proprietary research to help brands and clients understand the different cultural preferences of consumers around the world.The deal allows the access to MediaCom’s proprietary Cultural Connections research. This is expected to provide Unruly, an video ad tech company, the capability to build on the data and insight from its existing tools in gaining a better understanding of why video content resonates in some markets and not others. Additionally, it will allow the potential for video specialists to predict which additional markets advertisers should be targeting to maximise the impact of their content.A spokesman from Unruly said such insight has become increasingly critical at a time when brands expect messages and campaigns to travel far more widely than in the past.The cultural insight will also be incorporated into Unruly's first-party data segments, meaning advertisers will be able to target individuals within a specific territory that are more likely to have a cultural affinity with their video content through cultural private marketplaces (PMPs). Unruly will officially launch its new offering across Asia Pacific next month, before rolling it out across Europe and the US later in the year.“For the first time, we have the capacity to provide an objective and quantitative explanation for the differences we’ve observed between markets," Ian Forrester, global SVP, Insight at Unruly, said.In addition to giving its clients the access to a unique and groundbreaking data to possibly increase the effectiveness of their video campaigns globally, Forrester said the partnership serves to streamline its testing processes."While before we would need to test a video in each market to establish whether it would resonate in a territory, access to this new data source will mean we only need to perform one test to measure its impact across a number of different markets, making it the quickest way for brands to know where their ads will fly and where they will flop,” he added.MediaCom launched the Cultural Connections research project in 2016. The study is based on interviews with more than 60,000 consumers in 52 countries around the world. The agency is a member of WPP, the world's largest marketing communications services group, and part of GroupM, WPP’s consolidated media investment management arm.