• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, August 11, 2016

Dentsu Aegis Network, which has a long history in applying sophisticated marketing research techniques to its advertising and media-buying strategies, is restructuring two prized assets acquired in recent years -- Copernicus Marketing and Forbes Consulting Group -- and consolidating them into a new service offering inside digital agency network Isobar.

The new unit, dubbed Isobar Marketing Intelligence, will carry on a long tradition -- especially at Aegis -- of applying proprietary marketing research and analytics in order to create more effective advertising and media campaigns for its clients.

"Isobar has a deep research practice to support user experience design focused mainly on ethnographic and qualitative methods,” explains Isobar U.S. Co-CEO Jeff Maling, noting that the new practice will also incorporate Isobar’s existing consumer research operations.

“This gives us a market-leading quantitative and qualitative research group to not only support design but also to support customer segmentation, product strategy, new product development, pricing and ad testing,” he continues, giving a real-world example of how it is applied:

“We just did a new product strategy for a Fortune 500 company where we used this deep research capability to segment the market, size the market, determine a price point and features.  We used Isobar’s traditional skills to conceive, design and build the new offering. As more and more clients come to us to help them develop new products or even new businesses, we see this combination being used more and more.”

The new practice will be led by the original founders of Copernicus and Forbes, respectively -- Peter Krieg and David Forbes -- who will have the title of vice president, reporting to Isobar co-CEOs Geoff Cubitt and Maling.

The company said the new practice will continue to operate as an independent marketing research consultancy for clients including Avon, CVS, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, and Welch’s, but will also support and augment the research capabilities available to Isobar clients. 

That Dentsu Aegis Network chose to consolidate these assets inside Isobar is telling, because it speak of the growing importance that consumer insight -- especially so-called “user experience” -- has in designing and developing media interfaces that connect and sustain consumer interest in an increasingly crowded world of media experiences.

Aegis, in particular, has a long history of making deep investments in marketing research, most notably for acquiring MMA, one of the first scalable marketing mix modeling firms in the 1990s, and incorporating it as a service of Carat. MMA was ultimately rolled up into Aegis’ Synovate division and spun off, but Carat has continued its commitment to original consumer research and in recent years Dentsu Aegis has acquired outside assets, including both Copernicus and Forbes.