2022 Innovation of the year: Kantar

Kantar won for its Link AI tool which predicts how a typical sample of consumers would rate an advert in a survey, highlighting behavioural and creative metrics that drive an advertisement’s performance.

Link AI can predict a video advert’s in-market success in 15 minutes or less, and can extract up to 20,000 features from each video file, including images, optical character recognition features, audio and transcript.

These features are collated into the modelling process, combined with models trained on the Link AI database, and are then used to predict an advert’s creative effectiveness across up to 15 metrics.

Link AI is built on Link, a normative advertising database which consists of 230,000 tests and 35 million human interactions.

In 2021, Link AI was scaled globally with the ability to test digital and television adverts, including the Analyser module with diagnostic power, providing measures to help users understand and improve TV advertising performance.

Also, Link AI was launched on Kantar Marketplace, and since launch has supported more than 100 clients globally.

Kantar said that using Link AI led to a 30% rise in return on investment when improving an advert’s creative quality from ‘average’ to ‘best’.