Leading Hollywood analytics firm MarketCast is buying Deductive (formerly Dativa), a big data service provider to U.S media and consumer electronics in a deal that will help studio clients better predict audience behavior — including box office and PVOD consumption — and determine how best to target marketing dollars.
The acquisition, said to be in the $15-$20 million range, adds a team of Oxford data scientists and advanced analytics capabilities to MarketCast’s research and insights business. The company will now be able to tackle much larger data sets from digital platforms, connected devices and other third-parties, faster and with more scale, moving a lot more consumer data from a lot more sources quickly.
Deductive supports clients from NBCUniversal and Discovery to Vizio. Its data science services help them “find meaning from the complex, granular datasets being captured by today’s media platforms and connected devices,” MarketCast said. “With Deductive, MarketCast clients will now be able to pair primary custom research with advanced analytics to crunch a wider range of data and tease out insights and recommendations that are easy-to-understand and act upon by marketing and research leaders.”
MarketCast CEO John Batter told Deadline the deal moves it into the “the next frontier.”
“When we get asked to help CMOs and heads of research, we go out and talk to, say, 1,000 people for insights and to provide something actionable,” he said. Deductive will be “adding lots more data points about them. Instead of saying women say 18 to 30 feel this, we we can start to talk to our clients with deeper insights and more precise segmentation about those people [and] who they are to help our clients [understand] who is responding…. We think it adds specificity and an ability to be more predictive.”
MarketCast said the advanced capabilities are needed as audiences fragment across platforms and devices and the number of data signals grows exponentially.
“The acquisition of Deductive addresses the changing needs of modern media companies and brands that require an ability to process complex data from a variety of sources at speed and scale,” said Batter said. “MarketCast has long been known for its incredible quantitative and qualitative research capabilities. Being able to now add data science and advanced analytics to this research mix is game-changing for our clients and the industry as a whole.”
Best known for their groundbreaking work for Vizio’s Inscape data analytics business, Deductive was founded by a team of Oxford data scientists and TV data pioneers with backgrounds in content recognition and advanced media analytics. The company offers a portfolio of data science services, from helping companies combine first and third-party data sources from connected devices and set-top boxes to measuring marketing attribution using a nationally representative panel.
“With competition heating up among entertainment platforms, studios, broadcasters and streamers are increasingly looking for ways to tap into granular audience datasets to find fans for their content and understand the impact of their advertising,” said Michael Collette, Deductive founder-CEO. He said his company already shares many clients with MarketCast
MarketCast has been growing and streamlining. Earlier this year, it integrated its social digital opinion measurement firm Fizziology, research goup Insight Strategy and Turnkey Sports Intelligence under one MarketCast brand and leadership team.