John Hoctor on Revolutionizing Media Analytics with Newton Research’s AI Agents

John Hoctor, CEO of Newton Research, recently sat down to talk about how his company is using AI agents to change the way the media industry approaches data analytics. Newton Research specialises in developing AI agents that are trained to help agencies, brands and publishers with complex data science and analytics tasks.

Hoctor said advertising is all about data and its analysis. Many of the key analytical processes like marketing mix modeling (MMM), multi-touch attribution (MTA), match market tests, incrementality, lookalike modeling and audience segmentation are time consuming and resource intensive and often rely on spreadsheets or custom scripts.

Newton Research’s AI agents are designed to automate and streamline these workflows. Hoctor described AI agents as autonomous, goal-oriented, adaptive software that can do tasks with minimal human intervention.

Cannes Lions

AI Transforms Brand Storytelling at Cannes Lions

At Cannes Lions, industry leaders discussed the transformative impact of AI on brand storytelling, highlighting its influence on efficiency, transparency, and creativity from ideation to delivery.

June 27, 2025

A key differentiator for Newton Research, as Hoctor pointed out, is their philosophy of augmentation rather than replacement. Instead of trying to replace human data scientists, their agents act as “sidekicks” providing “superpowers” to existing teams. As John Hoctor says, “I like to say our agents help humans get their jobs done more quickly… It’s like we give humans superpowers through our agents.”

This allows data science and analytics teams who are often overwhelmed with ad hoc requests and repetitive data prep to get tasks done more quickly and efficiently.

By offloading the more mundane and time consuming parts of their work, human analysts can work on more clients, more strategic tasks and really infuse analytics into their operations and get more productive and better outcomes.