A new data shop, Mantis, was launched on Thursday.
The consultancy is the brainchild of Janice Liu, former SVP and GM of Vision7 martech company Magnet, who also previously worked as VP of digital solutions at Cossette and as head of digital personalization at CIBC.
The new venture, which counts Publicis Groupe Canada and EasyFinancial as clients, was created to transform the way brands collect, use and monetize first-party data.
“There’s a lot of jargon around data like ‘cookie depreciation,’ ‘walled gardens’ and ‘large language models’ – it doesn’t matter how you slice it though, your first-party data is incredibly valuable,” Liu says. “It informs, predicts and validates. It’s what makes the world go round.”
Liu touts the benefits of direct relationships between consumers and advertisers, free from third-party gatekeepers.
The Mantis team’s expertise spans data commercialization, advanced analytics, data supply chain optimization and retail media networks.
“One of the things we’re most excited about are retail media networks, which are becoming much more popular and essentially allowing businesses to reduce their reliance on tech giants like Google and Facebook for their digital advertising needs,” Liu says.
Joining Liu on the consultancy’s founding team are former Plus Company colleagues Mariele Calvo (people strategy lead), Lexy Khoo (operations lead), Kevin Jung (engineering lead) and Asmait Hailu (consulting lead). Mike Zablocki, ex-Toyota consultant, also joins as consulting lead.
In addition to the founding team, Mantis’ work is supported by a global collective of data and digital marketing consultancies including Native Touch, Making Science, and Clarisights.
