Supernova Award Category

The Problem

MarketShare’s data-analysis approach needed to evolve as the company expanded. The company wanted dynamic, rather than pre-defined, reporting capabilities along with the ability to drill down to the raw-data details on individual customer interactions.

What started as a Small Data analysis challenge at its founding in 2005 evolved into a Big Data challenge. By 2012 the firm shifted from analyzing gigabyte-scale data to using terabyte-scale data stored on Hadoop.

MarketShare Big Data analyses start with 20-30 terabytes of historical data, but its initial Big Data reporting approach – exporting Hadoop data extracts to Oracle Database and creating custom reports using Tableau – posed challenges:

• Data-analysis delays. MarketShare used MapReduce processing and Hive queries to develop customer-specific data sets for analysis, a step that took ~ 1 day.
• Data-export delays to Oracle Database.
• Report-development burdens caused by the necessity to manually create one-off, customer-facing reports using Tableau.
• Lack of detailed insight. MarketShare’s data extraction and reporting approach limited the ability to drill down from broad information to details in raw data on Hadoop. “We wanted complete transparency on each customer interaction, ranging from paid, owned and earned media to CRM, Sales and Service, which allows us to better understand the customer journey leading to conversion,” said Tanwir Danish, MarketShare’s head of product & UX.

The Solution

MarketShare implemented Arcadia Data in late 2014 and brought its Big Data visualization and reporting capabilities into production within its applications in the first quarter of 2015. Arcadia Data appealed to MarketShare in that it’s a Hadoop-native platform that provides direct access to data on Hadoop clusters. Arcadia Data also supports visualization, production and ad-hoc reporting to support fast turnaround on new types of attribution analysis reporting.

The company uses Arcadia Data for direct access to Hadoop data from MarketShare DecisionCloud Apps as well as for custom-reporting, visualization and ad-hoc analysis.

The results

A Hadoop-native visual analytics and BI platform, Arcadia Data enables the company to deliver relevant data and customized reports more quickly and easily, while also better supporting client-specific querying down to the level of individual customer interactions.

The benefits of MarketShare’s use of Arcadia Data include the following:

• Data extraction and data movement steps eliminated
• Custom-reporting streamlined: MarketShare client-services team uses Arcadia Data’s drag-and-drop Build interface to create templated reports covering the range of dimensions of data of interest to its clients. To generate client-specific reports, the team simply selects the parameters of interest to that customer and the reports are generated on the fly. “Arcadia was a better choice for us because the reporting approach scales,” says Danish. “Now we have a configurable environment versus having an ops person creating one-off reports.”
• Depth of analysis enhanced: The aggregated data extracts used in MarketShare’s original reporting approach limited the detail available for analysis. Arcadia Data’s filtering and drill-down capabilities make it possible for marketers to explore individual customer behaviors.

Metrics

The switch to Arcadia Data enabled MarketShare to deliver fresh marketing attribution data to its customers six times faster. It also enabled the company to deliver drill-down insight into the behaviors of individual (anonymized) customers. This depth of insight is crucial for marketers seeking to optimize cross-channel audience targeting. MarketShare also applies advanced, predictive analytics to offer campaign managers and media planners recommendations on future investments that are driving improved performance.

Metrics reflecting the benefit of MarketShare’s use of Arcadia Data include the following:

• Data extraction & movement steps eliminated to deliver speed The one-day step of creating data extracts and 1/2 step of transforming and exporting that data to a relational database have been eliminated.
• Custom-reporting streamlined: Where building custom reports used to take 3 days (including 1.5 days for report development), MarketShare now generates custom reports within 2-4 hours.
• Ability to deliver marketing attribution data to customers 6 times faster

The Technology

• Arcadia Data - Hadoop-native platform for visual analytics and BI reporting.
• MarketShare is running Arcadia Data on Altiscale, its cloud-based Hadoop service. 

Disruptive Factor

MarketShare’s foray into and subsequent taming of Hadoop demonstrates an understanding of the disruptive nature of the technology.

Managing data at scale is the first challenge in Big Data, and for that, plenty of organizations have settled on Hadoop and NoSQL databases as their next-generation platforms. The next (and perhaps bigger) challenge is analyzing data at scale, and on this front organizations employ a mix of old and new technologies. MarketShare started by boiling down Big Data sets into extracts that could be handled in

a conventional reporting environment, but the approach proved limiting in terms of depth of insight and time/labor intensiveness.

MarketShare demonstrated the courage to experiment with the new breed of Hadoop-native tools. Tools that were designed from scratch to handle data at scale while also supporting fine-grained analysis down to the raw data.

Shining Moment

Enabling MarketShare’s customers to see the details as well as the big picture in Big Data.

Big-picture trend analysis is fine, but for marketers and professionals in most industries, the most valuable insights lie in the detailed raw data. “If our clients see something of interest, they can drill down to campaign tactics-level details, including inventory providers, placements, offers, creatives and target audience,” says Danish.