Bain & Company launches new digital products and services business

08 May 2019 Consulting.us

Strategy firm Bain & Company has announced the launch of Bain Media Lab, in partnership with full-stack deep learning company Hive. The new business will combine emerging technologies with powerful data sets to offer clients a range of innovative products and services.

The Media Lab was incubated in the Bain Innovation Exchange, which uses Bain’s network of venture capitalists, start-ups, and technologists to help clients innovate, while helping Bain launch new ventures.

“We are excited to introduce Bain Media Lab and to announce our partnership with Hive,” Elizabeth Spaulding, the co-lead of Bain & Company’s global digital practice, said. “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.”

One of the lab’s initial products is Mensio, an AI-powered analytics platform that provides enhanced measurement, intelligence, and attribution to TV advertisements and sponsorships. The platform gives the traditional TV market the real-time campaign performance data, granular measurement of audience reach, and outcomes analysis more commonly found in digital marketing.

“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,” Dan Calpin, head of Bain Media Lab, said. “Mensio arms marketers and their agencies to transition from post-mortem analysis of TV ad spend to real-time optimization, and gives network owners long-elusive data that can help them recast the narrative on advertising.”

From the mind of Mensio

The platform will offer an intuitive cloud-based dashboard with point-and-click reporting. One version will be tailored to ad and sponsorship buyers (marketers and agencies), with another version for sellers (TV networks, sports leagues).

Mensio will give clients better insight into reach, frequency and attribution – measuring exposure of ads to given populations and segments, the distribution of frequency (such as the percentage of households which saw more than 20 ads from a brand in a month), and the impact of exposure, including store visits and purchases.

The product, currently in beta in the US, is built on Hive’s computer vision models, which identify commercials and sponsorship placements and more accurately measure their cumulative quantity and quality. The computer vision and AI places over a billion tags of metadata on TV to identify objects such as logos and product placements, while also scoring size, clarity, and location on the screen.

Bain recently applied Mensio in an analysis of the Super Bowl, measuring brand exposure through sponsorship placements and earned media. Nike, which supplies the NFL’s uniforms, had the most logo and product placements, with nearly 40 minutes of screen time for its iconic swooshes. Budweiser’s “Wind Never Felt Better” commercial, meanwhile, received the most live TV impressions of all ads during the marquee sports event.