Kagiso Connect’s leading research media house, SoundInsights, and award-winning multi-channel sales house Mediamark have joined forces to deliver a comprehensive solution that helps brands better decode consumer behaviour, media effectiveness, and business impact.

The strategic partnership between the entities combines audience first-party data and innovative research methodologies with Mediamark’s analytics personnel, capabilities and market reach, giving advertisers access to richer, more detailed audience data.

SoundInsights will serve as the flagship insights brand supporting Kagiso Connect and Mediamark’s joint advertiser solutions.

As the primary data engine behind trusted radio brands like Jacaranda FM and East Coast Radio, SoundInsights provides tailored research into listener behaviour and client needs, helping brands better connect with their audiences, plan media more intelligently and measure impact through research grounded in the South African context.

“Kagiso Connect operates in a dynamic market environment where consumer, audience and commercial realities are shifting every day,” says Nick Grubb, Kagiso Connect Chief Executive Officer. “We see SoundInsights as central to our ability to understand this very human complexity, and this new integration with Mediamark scales this capability tremendously.”

Over the past year, Mediamark and Kagiso Connect have worked closely together, combining expertise in audience intelligence, research, analytics, strategy and commercial insight. The result is a more integrated approach to helping brands measure campaign performance and the motivations, tensions and behaviours behind it.

“Today’s marketers need more than audience data and performance metrics. They need a deeper understanding of the people behind those numbers,” says Nozipho Dlamini, Senior Media Strategist at Mediamark. “By bringing together context, culture, behavioural insight and media intelligence, SoundInsights helps advertisers better identify what captures attention, creates emotional connection and ultimately influences action.”

At its core, SoundInsights is built on the belief that people are more than demographics, audience segments and data points. Their decisions are shaped by emotion, identity, culture, social influences, lived experience and the context in which they encounter brands.

“For too long, our industry has been focused on measuring audiences. The next frontier is understanding people,” says Melissa Mc Nally, Head of Research and Analytics, Kagiso Connect. “At SoundInsights, we sit at the intersection of context, culture and human insight, helping brands navigate the tensions that shape behaviour and decision-making. We know that people are rarely as rational or predictable as the models used to describe them. Their choices are influenced by emotion, identity, social dynamics, lived experience and the world around them.” 

Mc Nally adds: “Our ambition is to move beyond reporting what people did and towards gaining insight into why they did it. By combining human insight, cultural intelligence and behavioural measurement, we help uncover the forces that shape decision-making and the opportunities that drive growth. Because when brands know the human story behind the data, they can create stronger connections, make better decisions and unlock more meaningful growth.”

SoundInsights has evolved across three interconnected areas of intelligence. 

Creative Intelligence measures audiences’ emotional response to content, identifying moments that resonate or disengage and opportunities to improve effectiveness.

Audience Intelligence combines market intelligence with behavioural and cultural insight to uncover emerging trends, consumer tensions and sentiment shifts. 

Attribution Intelligence connects media activity to measurable business outcomes, understanding how channels, including audio, contribute to engagement, website visits, store traffic and consumer action.

In a world increasingly driven by automation, algorithms and AI, connecting with people becomes more valuable. The brands that succeed in the years ahead will not necessarily be those with access to the most data; they will be the ones that best connect with the people behind it.