Today, we are excited to announce that ET Medialabs (ETML), India’s leading performance marketing and analytics agency, will be joining McKinsey. Sixty colleagues from India with deep analytics expertise, proprietary technology, and proven methodologies will further strengthen McKinsey’s Digital Marketing Operations and Technology (DMOT) capabilities. With ETML, we now have over 200 digital marketing analysts, performance marketers, and data scientists across two global hubs in Asia and Latin America.
“Customer first is core to our DNA,” says Raghav Kansal, founder of ETML. This unwavering focus on customers is what Raghav attributes to the company’s success in just the last decade. “It’s a value we immediately felt was shared by McKinsey and deeply embedded in their culture,” he adds.
Winning in an era of customer-first marketing
CMOs and marketing leaders who prioritize understanding their customers’ needs are seeing remarkable results—growing 28 percent faster than their peers. By gaining an in-depth understanding of what their customers want at every stage of the journey, they can better deliver on their promises.
Growth, Marketing & Sales
Succeeding in this arena demands a new digital marketing muscle that blends digital marketing expertise, tech-enabled capabilities, and a new operating model. “To keep that muscle strong, rigorous performance management is a critical lever to driving any growth transformation, and it significantly enhances our ability to deliver rapid impact for our clients,” says Vincent Cremers, a McKinsey senior partner and a leader of McKinsey’s Growth, Marketing & Sales Practice. “That is where ETML, with its technical expertise in digital marketing-led scale-up and optimizing marketing spend, comes in.”
Scaling global impact with ETML’s expertise
“Since our acquisition of the Latin American boutique digital agency LOBO, we’ve seen many growth transformations across the firm leverage digital marketing capabilities across North and Latin America,” says Eunjo Chon, a McKinsey senior partner in Seoul. In fact, 60 percent of the firm’s marketing projects use DMOT today. “We saw an exciting opportunity to replicate and scale this success in Asia and set out to find the right strategic partner.” After scanning hundreds of companies over the course of six months, ETML was selected.
“Their deep domain expertise along with McKinsey’s breadth of knowledge brings a unique end-to-end offering to clients—enabling both short- and long-term impact,” says Lisa Harkness, a McKinsey partner. “From analytics to personalization to driving impact across markets, customer bases, and companies—this integration globalizes our ability to support the nonstop nature of digital in a truly 24/7 way.”
Typically, it takes at least six to 12 months to see impact from digital marketing. We’re seeing it immediately.
ETML has driven growth for scale-ups, unicorns, and multinationals, offering capabilities ranging from reducing ad waste to optimizing budgets and campaign impact time. For example, its diagnostic-to-insight approach cuts digital ad spend optimization time by 66 percent and boosts campaign impact time by 62 percent.
“What sets ETML apart is the speed and consistency of messaging across channels,” says Stephan Zimmermann, a McKinsey senior partner and leader of our DMOT offering. “Automation alone isn’t enough,” he explains. “Using customer insights to effectively personalize and enable clients to connect with their audience is where we’re most excited to see rapid impact.” In practice, this means a fully integrated McKinsey–ETML team working alongside clients to optimize their digital marketing operations and build up their capabilities side by side.
A next-level approach to performance marketing
McKinsey and ETML began a strategic partnership over two years ago and have since conducted 20 pilot tests together with over 15 clients across India, Thailand, Indonesia, and Japan. “The impact in engagements has been like nothing seen before,” says Eunjo. “Typically, it takes at least six to 12 months to see impact from digital marketing. We’re seeing it immediately.” ETML’s proprietary tool is a significant driver toward such success, drawing on over 100 analytics frameworks, machine learning models, and ad experiments conducted over ten years that enable monitoring across multiple data sets and various platforms.
Leveraging this tool, Eunjo explains how a joint McKinsey–ETML team was able to run large experiments while making changes in parallel on different platforms for a Japanese women’s apparel company. “It gave us unprecedented insights into budget allocation and customer segments in real time.”
Raghav explains that typically with performance marketing efforts, organizations see profits increase by up to four percentage points. For a leading Indian life insurance company, ETML helped them achieve a 15 percent reduction in acquisition costs and a fourfold increase in revenue. Meanwhile, a full-funnel strategy and operations optimization project for a real estate company resulted in twice the number of leads with the same advertising spend.
Beyond the impact and scale ETML has achieved to date, “We pride ourselves on our deep sense of caring and relentless focus on the growth of both our people and our clients,” says Raghav. “This partnership with McKinsey represents a tectonic shift in the trajectory of career growth for our people with infinite learning opportunities and exposure to high-impact projects across some of the biggest companies in the world.”