Data & Marketing Analytics @ UC San Diego Rady School of Management

HOW TO TEST AND MEASURE WITH AGILITY DURING A RETAIL TRANSFORMATION

In Target’s most recent quarter, the retail giant reported comparable sales growth of about 10% over the last two years – the best sales performance in over a decade. The company has also now achieved nine straight quarters of comparable-store sales growth, with annual digital sales exceeding 30%. This growth is fueled by a multiyear $7b investment Target made to compete in the evolving retail landscape and to appeal to a new generation of digitally-native consumers. The investment focused on stores, new brands, e-commerce, speedier delivery services and technology.

Meghna Sinha, Target Vice President of Data Sciences, will delve into her statistical test-and-measure approach to help the retailer navigate the many large-scale changes underway. Business transformation efforts are often inter-related, for example, supply chain transformation efforts impact stores, and changes in marketing strategies impact both digital and store sales. Therefore, a good read on the value of each effort is critical. This kind of measurement enables Target to pivot and/or iterate with speed on initiatives across the enterprise.

Join this session to hear how Target is building a test-and-measure culture by focusing on three challenges:
• More data can lead to more confusion. Governance of measurement is critical at large organizations.
• Robust test design requires statistical expertise. Organizations must prioritize hiring and teaching statistical and analytical skills.
• Manual steps should be continuously automated to enable end-to-end automation of testing and measurement.

Meghna Sinha

Vice President Data Sciences Target

HOW PETCO MEASURES THE IMPACT OF ITS MEDIA INVESTMENTS

In this presentation, the head of Marketing Analytics at Petco, Ranjeet Edlabadkar, will discuss the advanced methodologies his team uses to measure the impact of their media investments.

Ranjeet Edlabadkar

Director, Marketing Investments and Analytics Petco

APPLICATION OF NLP (NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING) ALGORITHMS TO MARKETING

In this presentation Dr. Xiong will discuss how to apply two NLP algorithms, Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Neural Embedding, to transaction data to segment consumers and to measure merchant similarities for better target marketing.

Shanji Xiong

Senior Vice President, Global Chief Scientist Experian

ARE YOU A COURAGEOUS BRAND?

Courage (noun): the mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty. Ryan Berman has devoted the last three years interviewing many of the most courageous people on the planet, including astronauts, Navy SEALs, tornado chasers, and business leaders from Apple, Amazon, Dominos, Google, and Method. Through this experience, he learned that companies that win share courageousness as a trait. As for the rest? 52% of the Fortune 500 since 2000 are extinct. Half the S&P 500 are predicted to be replaced over the next decade and 9000 brands will revolve on and off the Fortune 500 over the next six decades. Yet, there's a lack of urgency across most organizations to address these callous realities. In this keynote, Berman shares his learnings on how any being or brand can push through internal paralysis, stand out from the crowd, and earn a serious return on courage.

After this discussion you’ll be able to:

• Learn to take more calculated courageous risks in your organization including story telling/innovation
• Build a culture of empowered, courageous behavior and experimentation
• Utilize a modern day, step-by-step framework to becoming a Courage Brand
• Overcome the clarity epidemic we currently find ourselves in
• Begin to identify, address and overcome your largest corporate business fears
• Deliver a ‘Return On Courage’

Ryan Berman

Founder Courageous

HOW JACK IS COMBINING MACROECONOMIC MMM MODELS WITH PEOPLE-BASED INSIGHTS TO ACHIEVE SUCCESS

Mike Pietro & Curtis Bahr will discuss how Jack in the Box works with Carat to connect traditional MMM with their real-time data reporting system, Accumine, enabling faster model generation and creating a single source of truth for predictive analytics. The resulting plans are populated with true 1:1 People-based audiences derived from the M1 audience platform.

Mike Pietro

Director, Media Strategy and Communications Jack In The Box

MEASURING RETURN ON AD SPEND

In this session, Mike Perry will discuss how we try to measure the financial return on advertising spending, why it's a hard problem and the pros and cons of some common methods.  Mike will demonstrate some examples to illustrate.

Mike Perry

Statistics Team Lead and Data Scientist Google