CASE STUDY

DataSongs Big Data Analytics Platform for

Marketing Optimization Helps Clients
Understand Buying Behavior and Improve
Customer Targeting
Company: DataSong, San Francisco, CA
www.datasong.com
Industry: Software Development (Marketing Attribution and Optimization)
Challenge: Economically develop a scalable, high-performing R-powered Big Data
Analytics platform on which to provide services to clients
Solution: Revolution R Enterprise, leveraging RevoScaleR for Big Data Analytics, and
Hadoop for data management
Results: Company has achieved performance and scalability required to support its
growth. DataSongs platform processes 50 million scores per day per client.
DataSong saved a client $270,000 on one campaign; generated 14% lift for
another client.

Background
DataSongs marketing optimization and attribution engine uses historical data about
individual customers to predict and influence future buying behavior. With many
companies vying for consumer spending, DataSong, a San Francisco-based software
organization is increasing the precision with which marketing is analyzed. DataSong has
developed a unique way to understand attribution that takes into account sales from all
of a companys order channels as they come into their call center, web site, mobile sites,
or retail stores as well as activity in all of the marketing channels (display/retargeting,
email, social media, direct mail, etc). It goes well beyond traditional methods and is
significantly more accurate than simpler methods (last click, averaged, etc).
Additionally, DataSong is leveraging the attribution platform to offer solutions that
impact the top and bottom line, such as marketing treatment recommendations.
Examples include who to include in next months catalog mailing, or whom to exclude
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from your retargeting display campaign. As a result, DataSongs clients save money,
increase revenue per campaign and customize each customers relationship with the
company.

Figure 1: Without precise attribution modeling, many marketing departments simply

credit revenue to the last touch the customer had before a purchase. DataSongs
analysis shows this approach can cost marketers hundreds of thousands of dollars in
unnecessary spending.

Challenge: Attributing Marketing Spend to Customer Revenue

Once you know what is driving your marketing, you can better direct what
treatments you are using for specific people. Brandon Mason, CTO, DataSong.
DataSong understands its clients challenges very well. Without quantitative data to
guide them, marketers often attribute revenue incorrectly. When marketers are
unaware of the actual purchasing influencers, they spend too much on the wrong
things, afraid to reduce any part of the marketing spend because they dont know how it
will affect sales.
This problem is especially acute in consumer marketing companies that spend a large
percentage of revenue on marketing. Further complicating matters, many of these
companies have separate groups for catalog, e-mail or other marketing. Each group
justifies its budget by attributing revenue to its efforts. DataSongs analysis has shown
that many company marketing groups use flawed approaches such as the last touch
before purchase. As a result, the aggregate claims of revenue attribution of all the
departments often sums to greater than 100% of sales, which is impossible.
Marketing departments need an analytics-driven approach to help deal with the
increasing amount of complexity that has emerged in the last 10 years. Heres why:

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Weve combined
Revolution R
Enterprise and
Hadoop to build
and deploy
customized
exploratory data
analysis and GAM
survival models for
our marketing
performance
management and
attribution
platform. Given
that our data sets
are already in the
terabytes and are
growing rapidly,
we depend on
Revolution R
Enterprises
scalability and fast
performance we
saw about a 4x
performance
improvement on
50 million records.
It works
brilliantly.

It used to be about being able to quantify the results of what is now considered
basic and rudimentary information: POS data, direct mail (including catalog), email
distribution, and/or telemarketing. Through codes, marketers would be able to
attribute POS data with the specific marketing campaign. This approach isnt
effective today. Marketers have a much larger assortment to influence purchasing
(e.g. email, mobile messages, banner ads, search, catalog, in-store promotions,
affinity credit cards, etc.). These channels need to be considered alongside factors
that arent in their direct control (and which are often excluded from a companys
own assessment of revenue attribution), such as seasonal habits or the length of
time the person has been a customer.

Operational complexity makes it difficult to have one view of the customers

activity. Many marketing tactics are executed using disparate databases and
platforms.

IT systems that customize offers for each customer have matured, making it easier
to feature a new product, a price promotion, or loyalty points. Unless marketers
know what offers drives which customers, theyll end up programmatically using
the wrong tools for the job.

The availability of reduced cost per touch methods tempts marketers to increase
the frequency of touches, (i.e. mailing catalogs is orders of magnitude more
expensive than an email or text message), potentially over-saturating or even
annoying customers.

Customer mindshare has become increasingly difficult to win due to the constant
barrage of marketing being presented on television, in print, on websites and
mobile devices.
Marketers dont know how to utilize the terabytes of data collected about their
customers because of both its variety and range of formats. The amount of data
being stored in organizations (e.g. every mouse click, transcripts of conversations in
call centers, customer demographics and history, and even third-party-sourced data
such as credit scores), often called Big Data, has outgrown traditional analytical
tools. The value of this data is often untapped.

DataSongs principals, self-described data geeks, saw an opportunity to create a

platform an analytics engine that would utilize dozens of data types as inputs to
individual buying behavior models for each of its clients customers. Since they wanted
the ability to analyze data at the granular level for each customer, the DataSong
platform would quickly grow to rely on many terabytes of data. DataSong looked at the
current off-the-shelf applications and approaches and rejected them. Their platform
must allow for data exploration, allow them to customize the statistical methods used in

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the models, execute very quickly on big data and would need to scale without sacrificing
speed.
In order to be a game changer, they would need to build their own.

Figure 2: Modern marketers must utilize a huge amount of internal and external data to
attribute revenue per customer to specific variables (aspects of the marketing mix that
are in their control and elements that are out of their control) in order to optimize the
marketing mix and associated spend.

Solution: Custom Analytics with Revolution R Enterprise and Hadoop

We like the fact
that Revolution
Analytics is
bringing R to
Hadoop, and has a
strong Hadooprelated roadmap.
That kind of
enterprise support
is important to
us.
Brandon Mason

DataSongs purpose-built application is a modern, high-performance big data analytics

engine, scoring 50 million records per day for each of DataSongs customers. It marries
Revolution Analytics Big Data Analytics capabilities with Hadoops data management
and computational power. Since no two clients are exactly alike, the statistical methods
that underlie the analytical models can be customized to meet each clients exact
requirements.
From an analytics perspective, the company borrowed approaches from forwardthinking and more analytically mature industries. For example, DataSong adapted
models used in the bioscience sector, where GAM (Generalized Additive Model) survival
analysis techniques effectively measure differences in the outcomes in patients under
different treatment regimens. However, many of the methods that DataSong wanted to
use had not been designed for Big Data analytics. Using Revolution R Enterprise, which
is based on the power of the R statistical platform, DataSong built a big data analytics
engine utilizing multivariate statistics, time-to-event models and GAM survival analysis
techniques, which tells its clients about:

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Purchasing triggers
Who is most likely to buy
Cross-channel triggers i.e. looking through a catalog, but making an online
purchase
Recommendations which marketing treatment to apply (and when) per user
Strategic allocation Reallocating marketing funds as a result of modeling

DataSongs platform utilizes Revolution Analytics RevoScaleR, a set of big-data

statistical analysis capabilities offered with the Revolution R Enterprise software. With
RevoScaleR, the scalable, high-performance XDF data file format optimizes the
process of streaming data from disk to memory, dramatically reducing the time needed
for statistical analysis of large data sets. It runs on commodity hardware, which has
helped reduce the cost of the platform.
CEO John Wallace describes the results. Weve combined Revolution R Enterprise and
Hadoop to build and deploy customized exploratory data analysis and GAM survival
models for our marketing performance management and attribution platform. Given
that our data sets are already in the terabytes and are growing rapidly, we depend on
Revolution R Enterprises scalability and fast performance we saw about a 4x
performance improvement on 50 million records. It works brilliantly.
According to CTO Brandon Mason, We like the fact that Revolution Analytics is bringing
R to Hadoop, and has a strong Hadoop-related roadmap. That kind of enterprise
support is important to us.

Figure 3: DataSong has utilized Revolution Analytics Hadoop capabilities to leverage

RevoScaleRs Big Data Analytics capabilities and Hadoops data management and model
execution capabilities. The engine scores 50 million records per day per client using
commodity hardware.

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Revolution Case Study

Results: Reduced Marketing Costs and Revenue Uplift for DataSong Customers
With the help of Revolution R Enterprise, DataSong has created a big data analytics
solution for marketing optimization that has been credited with saving one client
$270,000 in just one campaign and delivering a 14% revenue uplift for another.
DataSongenables marketers to plan, measure, and optimize marketing campaigns across
all marketing channels using integrated software and customer-level, advanced revenue
attribution. Whether its three or a dozen multi-channel touches to the consumer,
marketers can reliably plan and allocate spend for each marketing channel based on
actual performance.

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About DataSong
DataSong enables marketers to plan, measure, and optimize marketing campaigns
across all marketing channels using integrated software and customer-level advanced
revenue attribution. DataSong was designed, developed and field tested by the
experienced team at Business Researchers, Inc. It evolved from their work providing
planning and analytic solutions to a number of premier brands and was developed in
close partnership with their customers to address their need for an integrated approach
to Marketing Performance Management. The DataSong team employs a multidisciplinary approach combining backgrounds in business, marketing, computer science,
math, physics and statistics to solve complex business problems.
Headquartered in downtown San Francisco, DataSong is a privately held, wholly owned
division of Business Researchers, Inc..

About Revolution Analytics

Revolution Analytics is the leading commercial provider of software and services based
on the open source R project for statistical computing. The company brings high
performance, productivity and enterprise readiness to R, the most powerful statistics
language in the world. The companys flagship Revolution R Enterprise product is
designed to meet the production needs of large organizations in industries such as
finance, life sciences, retail, manufacturing and media. Used by over two million analysts
in academia and at cutting-edge companies such as Google, Bank of America and
Acxiom, R has emerged as the standard of innovation in statistical analysis. Revolution
Analytics is committed to fostering the continued growth of the R community through
sponsorship of the Inside-R.org community site, funding worldwide R user groups and
offering free licenses of Revolution R Enterprise to everyone in academia.
Please visit us at www.revolutionanalytics.com

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