EXCLUSIVE: Largo, the AI-solutions company backed by Sylvester Stallone, has acquired U.S. consumer research and market insights firm E-Poll Market Research. The deal will look to redefine how brands, studios, agencies and advertisers understand and anticipate audience behaviour by leaning on E-Poll’s near three decades of audience intelligence.
Largo, which also has backing from Activision Blizzard VP Thomas Tippl, currently works with more than 600 companies, including several Hollywood studios and large agencies. This latest acquisition for Largo will see the Lausanne-based outfit now have a fixed U.S. presence under the banner Largo U.S. and is part of the company’s drive to expand within the global advertising and marketing sector. Last year, Largo acquired London-based market research technology and consultancy QuMind.
Largo plans to combine E-Poll’s flagship product E-Score, a database that measures audience perception of celebrities, brands, characters and TV programs, with its AI-driven predictive technology. Largo says this will enable its clients to better strategize and reduce marketing spend and investment in content.
Largo’s current audience testing technologies are built on its creation of high-fidelity digital twins with authentic, data-driven representations of real individuals, meaning its approach is based on human input. This results in digital twins that deliver a 90% accuracy rate when benchmarked against traditional testing methods. Thousands of these twins are available across 20 global markets and clients can generate insights in under an hour.
E-Poll has a wide base of entertainment clients including studios, networks, media agencies, broadcasters and brands, which means its research is tailored to audiences’ emotional connection to talent, characters, franchise and content.
The acquisition was led by Largo CEO and Co-Founder Sami Arpa and E-Poll Market Research President and CEO Gerry Philpott. Philpott will head up the U.S. operation as EVP Largo U.S. Operationally, E-Poll will continue to operate as a standalone brand but will be integrated into Largo’s ecosystem.
“We’re excited to be joining forces with E-Poll, who share our vision for redefining the future of data-backed market intelligence,” said Arpa. “We want to enable our clients to move faster and smarter from creative spark to market execution with united workflows, dynamic insight generation and significantly improved accuracy. Working together we are uniting human insight, historical depth and data driven foresight to push the boundaries of what’s possible at scale.”
Philpott added: “Entertainment and brand marketing is a global business, and the acquisition by Largo fulfils my vision of expanding E-Poll’s unique and powerful data set where it allows our experience to aid businesses in full end-to-end strategies. Largo is a young and dynamic company doing treat things and is a perfect fit for the products and services we’ve been delivering to clients for decades. They have a clear vision for the future and I’m very excited to help them make that happen.”
In February last year, Largo announced the closure of its Series A financing round, securing Stallone and Tipple as strategic partners and investors. Series B financing is currently underway and expected to close later this year.
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