McKinsey acquires ET Medialabs

McKinsey, a global management consulting firm has announced the acquisition of ET Medialabs (ETML), a performance marketing and analytics agency. 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 this acquisition, the company now has over 200 digital marketing analysts, performance marketers, and data scientists spread across two global hubs in Asia and Latin America. The collaboration seeks to enhance the company's offerings in customer-centric digital marketing.

“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.

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 optimising marketing spend, comes in.”

ETML has driven growth for scale-ups, unicorns, and multinationals, offering capabilities ranging from reducing ad waste to optimising budgets and campaign impact time. For example, its diagnostic-to-insight approach cuts digital ad spend optimisation 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 personalise 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 optimise their digital marketing operations and build up their capabilities side by side.