Venice marketing and public relations firm Creativ Strategies has joined forces with a Canadian data science firm.

The company, which works primarily with media and technology firms, now boasts the AI bona fides of Toronto-based talkAItive, which has patented seven programs it uses to scrape and interpret information from public internet sources. The combination, which was announced last month, creates a new division, titled Creativ Insights, within Creativ Strategies.

The two companies decided to combine operations after collaborating last year on a project for Culver City-based video game developer Scopely Inc.

“The project was amazing. The client was really pleased, and I turned around to these guys and said we should partner up and do things bigger and better together,” said Wes Morton, founder and chief executive of Creativ Strategies. “For me, agencies are a dime a dozen. I think the work we did was fantastic, but to really progress you need to differentiate yourself in the market. After we collaborated, it was really clear to me that, with our expertise in media and advertising and their expertise in data science, we could really build something together.”

Formed seven years ago, talkAItive’s programs are unique for being able to identify and categorize the tone of statements on, for example, social media posts, its founder Vibhu Bhan said. Its programs are capable of discerning when posts are meant to be sarcastic, he explained, which is an issue with other information-scraping programs.

“What I noticed was that a lot of data was being left on the table, which could easily explain how the customer of a business was feeling. At that time, we looked at the tools in the market and what we noticed was that they were very focused on engagement, which means they are counting (data points),” Bhan said. “But it doesn’t really tell you anything about how people are feeling in their utterances. That was what we saw as a white space that we could fill.”

With the move, Bhan is now chief operating and information officer for Creativ Strategies. 

Additionally, talkAItive data engineer Joe Lai is also formally joining the company umbrella as its chief technology officer.

“Me and Vibhu saw a lot of missed opportunities because we didn’t have somebody like Wes to market our technology,” Lai said. 

Officially, the two companies are operating as a joint venture, Morton said.

 The teams are sharing costs and profits, but he declined to delineate specifics or future benchmarks.

“Marketing is about understanding your consumer and crafting messages,” Morton said. “What I understood from our work together last year was that this machine learning and AI is really giving us the ability to understand humans on a mass scale, synthesize it and create robust reports that are actionable for clients.”

Morton formed Creativ Strategies in 2021, after he was laid off from an advertising job as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and taking on so many freelance clients that he “had to incorporate.” 

In addition to Scopely, other clients include 1stAveMachine, the National Havoc Robot League, Petco, Wells Fargo and the city of Toronto.