Blak Labs cuts brand analysis per pitch from 10 hours to 1
Blak Labs, a 50-person Singapore advertising and communications agency, replaced manual competitive research with SOMIN's real-time, GenAI-structured insight. Brand analysis fell from 10 hours to 1, content planning from 10 to 3 and client-reporting cost from $10,000 to $6,000 a month, freeing strategists for billable work.
Blak Labs, a 50-person Singapore agency built on structure
Blak Labs is a Singapore advertising and communications agency with about 50 employees and around S$5 million in annual revenue. It chose tooling over headcount to match rivals' larger research benches.
Pitching against bigger benches without a bigger research budget
Blak Labs needed agency-grade insight for each pitch, including speculative ones, without days of manual research.
- ✓ Rivals had deeper research and planning benches.
- ✓ Manual brand analysis could take days per pitch.
- ✓ Content audits and client reporting took several FTEs without proportionate output.
- ✓ Much of the salary cost went to repetitive manual work.
Four SOMIN modules across Blak Labs' pitching and reporting
Four connected modules replaced Blak Labs' manual pitch research and content audits.
Brand Tracker
On-demand, real-time competitive intelligence across social media.
Perspective Studies
Maps crowded messaging and gaps into a proprietary category audit per pitch.
Expressions
Turns the insight into market-ready creative ideas for pitches and campaigns.
Content Library
Automates content audits, freeing the 0.5 FTE they used to take.
Brand analysis from 10 hours to 1, reporting cost $10K to $6K
Research, planning and reporting all became faster and cheaper, and strategy teams now enter each pitch with the competitive set understood.
Understanding competitive sets is very valuable. What took days of research before now takes hours. SOMIN has streamlined our pitching process, given us quicker insights into activities by competitive brands across social media, and enabled us to identify gaps in the market to develop new strategies for our clients.
— Charlie, Co-founder & Managing Partner, Blak Labs
Three lessons from the Blak Labs rollout
Rivals' bigger research benches are a solvable disadvantage: Blak Labs closed the gap with tooling, not headcount.
Savings came from the back office too: automated audits and reporting returned people and budget to billable work.
Faster research changed the pitch itself: teams arrive with a defensible point of view, the shift behind Blak Labs' 5/5 vendor ratings.
Blak Labs case study FAQ
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SOMIN is a Singapore deep-tech platform that turns real-time competitor and audience intelligence into market-ready creative ideas, typically 13× faster than manual research. Clients include P&G, Audi, Ferrari, Gojek, Abbott, Citi, KFC, Nestlé and McDonald's in 11+ markets; agency partners include Dentsu, OMG, GroupM, Havas and Publicis.
Built by seasoned marketers and an AI professor: the methods behind this study are peer-reviewed at AAAI, ACM Multimedia, SIGIR, WSDM and in ACM TOIS. See the research and talks.
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