On March 6, 2025, management consulting company McKinsey acquired ET Medialabs (ETML), an Indian performance marketing and analytics agency. 60 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 ETML, the company now has over 200 digital marketing analysts, performance marketers, and data scientists across two global hubs in Asia and Latin America.
“Customer first is core to our DNA,” said Raghav Kansal, founder of ETML. This unwavering focus on customers is what Kansal 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 added.
“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. That is where ETML, with its technical expertise in digital marketing-led scale-up and optimising marketing spend, comes in,” said Vincent Cremers, a McKinsey Senior Partner and a Leader – Growth, Marketing and Sales Practice.
“Since our acquisition of the Latin American boutique digital agency LOBO, we’ve seen many growth transformations across the firm leverage digital marketing capabilities across North and Latin America,” said Eunjo Chon, a McKinsey senior partner in Seoul.
60% of the firm’s marketing projects use DMOT today. “We saw an exciting opportunity to replicate and scale this success in Asia and set out to find the right strategic partner,” added Chon. After scanning hundreds of companies over the course of six months, ETML was selected.
“Their deep domain expertise along with McKinsey’s breadth of knowledge brings a unique end-to-end offering to clients—enabling both short- and long-term impact,” said Lisa Harkness, a McKinsey partner.
“From analytics to personalisation to driving impact across markets, customer bases, and companies—this integration globalises our ability to support the nonstop nature of digital in a truly 24/7 way.”
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% and boosts campaign impact time by 62%.
“What sets ETML apart is the speed and consistency of messaging across channels,” said Stephan Zimmermann, a McKinsey senior partner and leader of DMOT offering.
“Automation alone isn’t enough,” he explained. “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.
McKinsey and ETML began a strategic partnership over two years ago and have since conducted 20 pilot tests together with over 15 clients across India, Thailand, Indonesia, and Japan.
“The impact in engagements has been like nothing seen before,” said Eunjo. “Typically, it takes at least six to 12 months to see impact from digital marketing. We’re seeing it immediately.”
ETML’s proprietary tool is a significant driver toward such success, drawing on over 100 analytics frameworks, machine learning models, and ad experiments conducted over ten years that enable monitoring across multiple data sets and various platforms.
Leveraging this tool, Eunjo explains how a joint McKinsey–ETML team was able to run large experiments while making changes in parallel on different platforms for a Japanese women’s apparel company. “It gave us unprecedented insights into budget allocation and customer segments in real time.”
Kansal explained that typically with performance marketing efforts, organisations see profits increase by up to four percentage points. For a leading Indian life insurance company, ETML helped them achieve a 15% reduction in acquisition costs and a fourfold increase in revenue. Meanwhile, a full-funnel strategy and operations optimisation project for a real estate company resulted in twice the number of leads with the same advertising spend.
Beyond the impact and scale ETML has achieved to date, “We pride ourselves on our deep sense of caring and relentless focus on the growth of both our people and our clients,” said Kansal. “This partnership with McKinsey represents a tectonic shift in the trajectory of career growth for our people with infinite learning opportunities and exposure to high-impact projects across some of the biggest companies in the world.”
