MARKETING ANALYTICS AS A SERVICE

MARKETING ANALYTICS AS A SERVICE WEATHER BASED CONTENT PERSONALIZATION Joseph A. Marr, Ph.D. Senior Principal Data Scientist SYNTASA Kirk D. Borne, Ph.D. Advisory Board Member SYNTASA MAY 2014

INTRODUCTION: IMPACTFUL MARKETING FOCUS According to a recent IBM study 1, top performing marketers tend to be significantly more adept at tracking, technology, and analytics and use these tools to develop more sophisticated and adaptable solutions. Furthermore, top marketers tend to personalize marketing offers. IBM illustrated these differences in Figure 1 which compares highly successful marketers against their less successful peers. Circled in red are those business activities where top marketers are most impactful: FIGURE 1: Contrasting High Impact Marketers with Other Marketers Customer context is all about personalization. And personalization matters. According to Venture Beat News 2, As consumers continue gravitating towards personal online experiences, it s important for businesses wanting to retain a loyal customer base to remain a step ahead of their users. This means swapping mass marketing techniques for tailored messages that speak to users on an individual level. To achieve deeper data analysis and enable improved execution on personalized marketing campaigns, marketers must find an optimal combination of digital marketing expertise and technology that will yield actionable results. Conventional toolsets cannot provide a marketer much needed insight into his or her audience. Instead, the marketer is required to find the proper talent to apply technical expertise to a set of tools to gain further data and customer insight, instead of being able to automatically connect the tools and data in the packaged software, causing a breakdown in the marketing analysis process. 1 http://www.forbes.com/sites/kimberlywhitler/2013/05/21/what are the biggest challenges facing marketers accordingto new ibm study/ 2 http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/20/3 challenges facing marketers in 2014/

In an attempt to achieve this combination of expertise and technology, most enterprises look to services based firms that offer from scratch solutions. The drawbacks to building from scratch solutions are numerous, including: Long time to market Custom built integrations Inability to leverage existing IT investments No flexibility or scalability No integration of industry best practices Escalating and unpredictable costs There is a large gap in the marketing analytics capabilities offered by popular products. While these products provide tools, delivered through the cloud, for deeper analysis, they often leave it up to the end user to gain value and extract additional customer insight from integrating and analyzing data outside of the status quo marketing process, either within the organization, or from third party sources. Integration of existing data with data from third party sources, and applying advanced analytics to the integrated data, is a key challenge for marketing professionals today. SYNTASA s Marketing Analytics as a Service solution solves these problems with a unique cloud based, open source architecture. ADVANCED DATA SCIENCE: MARKETING ANALYTICS AS A SERVICE Marketing Analytics as a Service augments clients marketing activities and enhances their market competitiveness with advanced decision science. We are successful precisely because we take time to understand our clients context their business environment, and their location within it and then, we apply that understanding to create impactful, customized business recommendations that work: We combine industryleading technologies with analytic data science capabilities to provide our clients with real time decision support, thereby enabling our clients to act systematically on the insights we provide them. Among the top 8 findings reported at the 2014 Digital Marketing Summit was this 3 : Data is only as useful as your ability to action it. SYNTASA delivers advanced data science with that as our primary goal: providing our clients with data driven actionable insights. Marketing Analytics as a Service has been years in development, and extends the analysis capabilities of enterprise multi channel digital marketing solutions to include offline (internal and external) data and open source technology, providing much deeper real time customer insights. These insights go beyond descriptive analytics to include predictive and prescriptive analytics that enable advanced decision making across the marketing tier. Effective, real time marketing decision support results from the intelligent application of computational data science techniques. From machine learning and evolutionary computation, through statistical analysis and high dimensional data visualization, Marketing Analytics as a Service bridges the gap between theory and practice. We utilize state of the art open source and proprietary toolsets, to simultaneously focus our internal expertise and leverage best practices and lessons learned from our various client applications.. As a result, our clients gain unparalleled access to on demand analytics. 3 http://www.cmo.com.au/article/543379/8_things_we_learnt_about_big_data_analytics_from_adobe_summit/ 3

Our ability to combine data science with domain expertise and apply that combination to problems of consequence, is unmatched in the marketing industry today. The combination drives unique insights. For example, our capabilities to identify and integrate contextual data of specific relevance to a given problem led directly to revenue enhancement strategies for a large retail client. The same insights are applicable on any commercial scale and application thus potentially bringing Marketing Analytics as a Service to the broader marketplace. RETAIL USE CASE: MARKET AGILITY Marketing Analytics as a Service identifies systematic actions to be taken at critical decision points in the customer engagement journey (customer awareness, acquisition, and retention), supported by insights developed through our data science techniques. The result is near real time response to the varying conditions that influence our clients positions in their respective markets. For example, a large retail client is interested in the impact of weather on product sales at an intrastate level. In response, we developed an industry leading tool that enables our client to track and respond to changes in predicted weather patterns in real time thus enhancing their overall revenue capture across the entire continental United States marketing area. Furthermore, our revenue capture strategy recommendations are product specific: Product strategy recommendations differ with respect to geography, season, and weather patterns. This combination of historical weather, weather forecasts, and product trend information with real time measurements enables us to predict changes in product market dynamics over time. The result is agile market response. Figure 2 outlines this decision framework: FIGURE 2: Decision Framework for Retail Analytics Use Case 4

ENTERPRISE DEPLOYMENT: PLATFORM INTEGRATION Marketing Analytics as a Service is forward deployable. Our analytic engine resides close to client enterprise platform and data, thereby avoiding the need for clients to adjust their platform or to move their data. System and data integrity and security are therefore respected from the outset. Furthermore, our analytic engine outputs continuously, thus offering our clients a constantly up to date market picture and recommendations that respond to the changing nature of that picture, as illustrated in Figure 3. FIGURE 3: SYNTASA s Marketing Analytics Engine Integration into Your Existing Infrastructure With an open source platform, Marketing Analytics as a Service is highly scalable, giving businesses the ability to incorporate much larger data sets, whether external (geographical or weather data) or internal (CRM or similar enterprise applications), to create a more complete customer profile and perform higher level analytics. Marketing Analytics as a Service enables predictive analytics (determining future outcomes based on historical data and performance) and prescriptive analytics (anticipating what, when and why future actions will happen, as well as offering suggested options for differing outcomes and performance), which are unique offerings in today s marketplace. 5

PLATFORM OF CHOICE FOR ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS Marketing Analytics as a Service is the analytic platform of choice in today s data intensive environment. With its ability to handle large data throughput requirements via distributed computing, and incorporate detailed personalization via advanced decision science methods, our platform is poised to grow flexibly with your needs, rather than bottleneck them. In addition, we offer customer specific configurations designed to respond to unique requirements. It s all about insight. Today s successful marketing professionals demand fresh insight based on prevailing market conditions, with capabilities to act decisively on that insight. We provide our clients with continuous, actionable insights. NEXT STEPS For more information, or to schedule a demo of SYNTASA s Marketing Analytics as a Service capabilities, please contact: Grant Wagner Vice President of Sales and Marketing Grant.wagner@syntasa.com 703 508 6752 6