From Ideation to Insights: Creating Business Value from Data

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Ideation to Insight: Experimentation in Marketing Conference hosted by the UC Davis Master of Science in Business Analytics program in partnership with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).

ANA is the oldest and largest trade association in the U.S. advertising industry, encompassing over 25,000 prestigious brands that collectively spend $400+ billion dollars annually. It remains the unicorn association dedicated to serving all aspects of marketing.

The virtual conference brought together top minds in data-driven marketing to explore data testing and hear best practices, actionable takeaways and insightful case studies on how top brands use data and its impact on marketing. The goal: to develop savvy professionals capable of leading unprecedented corporate change and creating business value from data.

I learned so much and have distilled down these highlights:

"Testing" as a Controlled Experiment

Narasu Rebbapragada, an associate director for marketing performance and digital acceleration at The Clorox Company, focused on how to move from the testing and learning phases to achieving marketing excellence in an uncertain world.

Rebbapragada described “testing” as a controlled experiment where we alter one variable and leave the other the same and then measure the difference within a certain degree of confidence. She stressed that what we learn from the experiment must be accountable to business priorities and scalable in values and that experiments should build on each other. 

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Evidence-based Decisions

Intuit's Makram Mansour, a group product manager, and Ravi Nagaraju, director of experimentation platform, discussed the importance of rapid experimentation in marketing. One major takeaway: the ability to make decisions based on evidence from data helps minimize bias in decision-making, especially when working in a complex organization with many networking effects.

Driving Optimization from Insight to Action

On the techniques of driving optimization from insight to action, Steve Rude, manager of digital optimization and personalization and analytics at Land O' Lakes, described “insight” as a revelation of what happened and why it happened. 

Rude noted that it’s important to ensure that data is sufficiently captured across all platforms. A successful test must be actionable, he said, not just interesting. To achieve this, each idea must have a clear hypothesis and success metric.

Closing Session

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The conference closed with a session on “Leveraging mixed method insights and experimental design to help improve the marketing conversion funnel,” delivered by Ruchika Singh, director of data science and insights at Spotify. 

Singh described mixed methods as integrating rigorous quantitative and qualitative methods to draw the strengths of each to really understand the reasons behind noticeable trends in the marketplace. It’s also important to capture the most important questions your widest audience is asking. 

Filled with invaluable new knowledge, our burning questions were answered, and attendees logged off filled with greater confidence, ready to use experimentation techniques from ideation to insight in our work.