Partly-owned by WPP, Circus Social announced 20/Twenty following the SPH Plug & Play Accelerator programme launch in Singapore, in which 20/Twenty was selected.
According to Prerna Pant, general manager at Circus Social, the company has received support from WPP since 2012, but the accelerator was an opportunity to “pivot from being a digital agency to a product company”.
“Being part of an accelerator is something very few startups have the opportunity to do,” said Pant. “Out of around 280 companies that applied, we are honoured and excited to be selected.”
Pant also noted the suitability of the accelerator with SPH Plug & Play being a marriage between a “media powerhouse (SPH)” and the “experience and grit on tech start-up innovation from the Valley (Plug & Play)” in addition to Singapore's government investment arm, Infocomm Investments.
20/Twenty is an iteration of Circus’s earlier “social intelligence” tool named Eureka. Much like its previous design, 20/Twenty positions itself as a “collaborative, inspiration dashboard” combined with a social listening and monitoring tool.
“Over the course of almost three years, Circus developed numerous projects and campaigns for our clients ranging from MNC's like Unilever and Intel and worked with agency partners like Ogilvy and Edelman, Zeno,” said Pant.
In the process of trying to grow Eureka, the company said it spoke to over 150 marketers to discover what they wanted as part of Eureka. “What we learned was invaluable to us in conceptualising what 20/Twenty would consist of while maintaining the backbones of what Eureka was,” Pant said.
Similar to the propositions of other social intelligence platforms, 20/Twenty “scans, analyses, and visualises data in an easy-to-understand and actionable manner”. Since its soft launch in February this year, the platform has served clients such as Audi Singapore and Coca-Cola Myanmar, according to the company.
When asked what sets the platform apart fro competitors, Pant said the concept is to offer more than just 'monitoring'. The product has three main features: Listen (monitor conversations around a brand), Discover (conduct market research) and Collaborate (generate ideas, track and assign actions among collaborators).
“On top of this we are building notifications and alerts when we spot 'an event' in your brand's world like a drop in share of voice or increase in negative sentiment,” said Pant “It will also produce 'intelligent' reports that you can receive daily in your inbox to save marketers time, resources and money.”
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