Dentsu Kenya unveils AI-powered marketing tools to help brands better understand consumers

Dentsu Kenya has launched two new marketing technology platforms aimed at helping businesses gain deeper insights into consumers, improve advertising performance and make more informed marketing decisions.

The company on Tuesday unveiled Merkury and COPO (Consumer In Your Pocket), describing the platforms as an integrated solution that combines customer identity, audience activation and AI-powered consumer intelligence.

The launch comes as companies increasingly face challenges in understanding customers across multiple digital channels while operating in a privacy-first environment that places greater restrictions on how consumer data is collected and used.

According to Dentsu Kenya, many businesses struggle with fragmented customer information spread across different platforms, making it difficult to build a complete picture of their audiences.

Merkury, the company's identity and data platform, is designed to solve that challenge by bringing together customer information from multiple sources into a single view.

The platform allows brands to enrich audience profiles, identify customers across different channels and deliver more targeted marketing campaigns.

Dentsu says the platform enables organisations to move away from disconnected marketing efforts towards a more integrated strategy that improves customer engagement while allowing businesses to measure campaign performance more effectively.

Working alongside Merkury is COPO (Consumer In Your Pocket), an artificial intelligence-powered consumer intelligence platform built on the same data ecosystem.

The platform uses a conversational interface that allows marketers to ask questions in natural language and receive real-time insights into consumer behaviour, emerging trends and audience preferences.

According to the company, the goal is to simplify complex consumer data and enable marketing teams to make faster, evidence-based decisions without relying on lengthy manual analysis.

The platform can also help businesses test marketing ideas, validate campaign assumptions and identify new opportunities based on changing consumer behaviour.

Before the official rollout, Dentsu Kenya tested the technology through pilot campaigns involving clients in the banking and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sectors.

The campaigns, which used Merkury-powered audience strategies across Meta and Google's DV360 programmatic advertising platforms, recorded notable improvements in audience engagement.

According to the company, the campaigns generated a 57.2 per cent increase in total brand interactions compared to previous performance.

Programmatic advertising campaigns also maintained a click-through rate of more than five per cent, significantly above the industry benchmark of between one and two per cent, despite targeting more specific audience segments.

Dentsu says the results demonstrate that identity-driven marketing can improve both campaign efficiency and audience quality while helping brands reach larger audiences.

The company believes the platforms will be particularly valuable for organisations in sectors such as banking, telecommunications, retail and FMCG, where understanding rapidly changing consumer preferences has become increasingly important.

Speaking during the launch, Dentsu Kenya Chief Executive Officer Joel Rao said modern marketing success depends on how effectively businesses can understand and activate customer data.

He said Merkury enables companies to consolidate fragmented customer information into a unified view, while COPO converts that information into actionable consumer intelligence that supports better decision-making.

According to Rao, the early pilot campaigns demonstrate how combining consumer understanding with audience activation can improve marketing performance and deliver measurable business outcomes.

The introduction of Merkury and COPO reflects a broader shift towards artificial intelligence and first-party data in digital marketing as companies seek more precise ways to reach customers while complying with evolving privacy requirements.

Dentsu Kenya said the two platforms will be integrated across its media, customer experience and creative services, giving clients access to a connected marketing ecosystem designed to improve campaign planning, execution and performance measurement.