In a landscape of tighter budgets, stricter data privacy rules and the constant push to do more with less, marketers are being asked to deliver precision, performance and scale – all at once.
It’s a tall order, but one DAC believes it can meet with IRIS, its AI-native, Generative Marketing Intelligence (GMI) powered platform built to simplify complexity and increase performance. IRIS uses generative AI to surface sharper insights, support faster decisions and deliver measurable impact – all with a focus on local relevance.
IRIS combines four core elements – data, context, internal expertise and AI – for what DAC calls GMI. This enables teams to synthesize and activate data, tailor creative to specific audience moments, evaluate media investments and continuously optimize campaigns.
Founded on DAC’s experience in enterprise-to-local marketing, IRIS is engineered for precision, capable of processing and applying data at micro or macro scales – including postal code-level detail, making it a powerful tool for national brands to connect meaningfully with audiences on a granular level, across multiple channels.
The journey stages screen in IRIS provides a clear view of audience engagement across key touchpoints.
“Our clients are telling us that they don’t want to have an agency for ‘this,’ and an agency for ‘that,’” explains Dan Temby, SVP of technology. “They want one organization that can orchestrate across all of the different channels.”
That desire for simplicity and cohesion underpins IRIS’s core operating philosophy: “magnetic utility.” In other words, says Temby, “if we build something that makes people go, ‘This is awesome. This makes my life so much easier,’ then they will want to use it.”
IRIS is already delivering measurable efficiency gains, with tasks that once took days now taking minutes. But beyond speed, the system is reshaping how teams work by unlocking new capabilities, freeing up time for deeper thinking and empowering multidisciplinary talent.
“It’s a democratization of capability,” explains Nasser Sahlool, SVP of client strategy. “It allows people to get beyond the tasks and functions that they’ve historically been limited to. It allows us to be smarter, moving beyond data into true insights… because it frees up the space and time for people to actually be able to think.”
The goal is to move away from time spent on low-value executional tasks and move the focus instead on “the higher-order, most strategic, most valuable thinking and effort that we can possibly do,” Temby explains. IRIS supports this shift by centralizing data, automating repetitive tasks and unlocking bandwidth for experimentation, insight and creativity. “It’s about greater outcomes, greater insight, another experiment, another idea,” he says.
Custom allocations in IRIS help marketers fine-tune media investments at a hyper-local level.
In a recent project with a major regional telco, for example, DAC used IRIS to transform the client’s traditional location-based planning into something far more precise and impactful. The client had relied on a broad “buy everything” approach, but DAC’s team layered subscriber data over census data to create a cluster analysis at the postal code level – allowing them to build and execute media plans by individual postal codes.
Previously, this kind of location modeling might have required hundreds of thousands of dollars in location studies. But with IRIS, DAC was able to stitch together the right data, apply machine learning and do it all within the existing budget parameters. Behind the scenes, DAC’s agents helped select the data, build and run the models and deliver strategic insights at unprecedented speed and value.
“The simple fact that we were able to do that absolutely transformed their results and impact,” says Sahlool. It was a level of granularity and media orchestration that would have been unthinkable using traditional models alone, he notes.
In fact, IRIS is helping DAC reimagine what clients should expect from an agency in 2025. Temby jokes that, in this time of shrinking budgets, the ask is always to do much more with much less. “For once,” he says, “I think we might actually be able to give you better, faster and cheaper.”
For more information on IRIS and working with DAC please visit their website.
Discover how brands drive engagement and maximize ROI in a privacy-first world – download DAC’s whitepaper for a step by step guide on enterprise-to-local execution
CONTACT:
Sonia Allard
VP Marketing
sallard@dacgroup.com
