Crayon Data enters Indian market

GroupM, Mindshare and Crayon Data together aim to map the taste of Indian consumers.

Big data start-up Crayon Data, along with the WPP-owned media investment management firm GroupM and its subsidiary Mindshare, is setting up operations in India. Its foray into the Indian market follows chairman emeritus of Tata Sons, Ratan Tata's personal investment last week.

Suresh Shankar, founder of Crayon Data, says, "As life goes digital, and choices proliferate in every aspect of our life, we move towards 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."

CVL Srinivas, India CEO, GroupM, says, "GroupM is changing the way marketers approach the business of media. To bring the Crayon Data proposition to India together with the WPP data alliance, reflects our ambition to help our clients know the tastes of Indian consumers in order to serve them better."

Commenting on this, Prasanth Kumar, CEO of Mindshare South Asia, says, "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." Kumar feels that to understand the tastes and mindsets of consumers is extremely important and the alliance, therefore, is very important, especially since there is a strong focus on digital.

Crayon Data has built a proprietary big data platform called SimplerChoices which ingests, curates, and algorithmically predicts the tastes of millions of consumers. Headquartered in Singapore, with a development centre in Chennai, the SimplerChoices engine simplifies the decision-making process for marketers. It uses proprietary algorithms to sort the complexity and present meaningful connections between data points along with predictions of what consumers really want.

The foundation of Crayon's choice engine is the Taste Graph (B2C) and Interest Graph (B2B). Crayon's Taste Graph has over 550 million Taste Nodes reaching close to a billion, while the Interest Graph has extensive information on over 10 million enterprises, with 500 million data points.

This Taste Graph is mapped into vast internal (enterprise) and external (online and social) data set 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 the consumers of its enterprise clients.

Bringing Crayon Data is a part of WPP's move towards a data-led approach to marketing. 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. In India, the alliance wants to create a unique data coalition across media agencies and media owners, to deliver the vision of offering personalised choices to millions of Indian consumers.