Crayon Data enters Indian shores, allies with GroupM

Press and Media   |   
Published December 9, 2015   |   

Singapore based big data start-up, Crayon Data is setting up India operations in association with WPP’s media agency conglomerate GroupM. Mindshare, one of the GroupM agencies, is all set to bring its global alliance with Crayon Data to the Indian market. Mindshare and Crayon Data aim to map the browsing history of millions of Indian consumers, which will allow enterprises to target consumers more precisely.
Recently, ET wrote that Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons, invested an undisclosed amount in Crayon Data at a personal capacity.
“GroupM is changing the way marketers approach the business of media. Together with the WPP data alliance, bringing the Crayon Data proposition to India reflects our ambition to know more deeply than anyone else the tastes of Indian consumers and use that to help our clients target them better” says CVL Srinivas, India CEO of GroupM.
Mindshare partnered with Crayon Data in 2014, and has seen significant success in other Asia-Pacific markets, in algorithm based ad-targeting and personalisation capabilities. Prasanth Kumar, CEO of Mindshare South Asia said “Through this alliance, Mindshare’s proprietary data and research are further enriched with Crayon Data’s analytics. This will help us bring in both agility and adaptive solutions for our clients. Understanding the tastes and mind-set of consumers is extremely important and will be a great advantage for us especially since there is a strong focus on digital. In our journey to understand our consumers even better, this will be a great advantage.”
Crayon Data, has built a proprietary big data platform called SimplerChoicesTM that allows it to ingest, curate and algorithmically predict the tastes of millions of consumers.
Suresh Shankar, founder of Crayon Data, said, “As life goes digital, and choices proliferate in every aspect of our life, we will move to a world centred around personalisation, where companies understand tastes and preferences at an individual level, and use that to make choices simple and relevant for their consumers”.
Crayon has also developed a global “consumer taste graph”, which maps choices across 15 categories, using machine learning and complex algorithms. This taste graph is then mapped to vast internal (enterprise) and external (online and social) data sets to generate a unique taste fingerprint of each consumer. This taste fingerprint in turn allows it to provide a set of highly personalised choices, to consumers of its enterprise clients.