MARC USA

Change the Game in Customer Data with CDPs

corpdev_admin — Wed, 02 Oct 2019 02:56:23 +0000

Blog

Change the Game in Customer Data with CDPs

TJ Crawford, SVP/Director of Digital Strategy, MarTech and Analytic Solutions, explores how CDPs efficiently keep brand messaging in sync for each customer across channels.

No doubt personalized engagement is the key to high value customer relationships. But how do you deliver truly personalized engagement – the right message at the right time to the right targets amid the ever-growing fragmentation of channels – most efficiently and effectively?

For many brands, the answer is a CDP – Customer Data Platform (also known as Engagement Hub, Decision Engine or Experience Platform). Here’s a quick primer on CDPs and how to know if it’s the right investment for your brand… because these powerful tools don’t come cheap.

Let’s imagine your potential best customer’s journey as powered by a CDP.

• A consumer visits your website and browses across several different products. The CDP tags them and tracks the products they are interested in anonymously via cookies.
• They like what they see and sign up for more by giving you their email, where we find out the consumer is female. The email and gender information is then aggregated together with the previously anonymous cookie information, but now we have identity.
• She then gets emails from you and interacts with them.
• Bingo – you see what she interacts with – providing more usable data about her.
• Bingo again – she fills out a form – now you have her name.
• This allows you to get even more information about her from third party vendors and merge all this info into one record.
• Continuing to like what she sees from you, she downloads your app – enabling you to send push notices about products, services and offers designed to her specific interests and triggers and to track which channels she prefers and responds to.
• You’ve reached the pot of gold – now you can truly personalize her every interaction with your brand from custom experiences when she visits your website to emails, app offers and even her call center and in-store experiences.
• Having this much information allows you to go even farther and predict likelihood to purchase, replenishment cycles and more. That level of insight allows you to unlock performance and revenue for your brand.

The beauty of CDPs is their ability to bridge the gap between anonymous data gained through AdTech channels with MarTech-driven identity to manage communications. CDPs rely on interactions you’ve already built through paid media to match those anonymous contacts with your known customers. This vastly increases both your knowns and what you can do with them – putting your omni-channel CRM strategies on steroids.

What’s more, you’re now maximizing the value of your media investment – efficiently bridging the gap between media and CRM. Instead of repeatedly paying to engage and convert anonymous prospects, once you have identity, you can more efficiently engage and exclude your knowns.

So, let’s peek behind the screen for a quick look at how CDPs work.

The best CDPs integrate with a breadth of channels – websites, email, mobile apps, SMS, call centers, paid media and more – and then orchestrate individual customer engagement within all those channels. These 360° customer profiles are often known as Golden Records because they represent the central truth for each individual in relation to the brand and marketplace.

With the real-time data CDPs provide, you not only have a fuller understanding of each customer, but you’re also able to predict their needs and drive their actions by personalizing every message and delivering it at the right time and channel. The power is amped up even more by overlaying AI-driven advanced analytics and predictive models to guide messaging.

Caveat – CDPs don’t replace websites, mobile apps, email or data analytics. What they do is make all these elements more powerful and efficient by streamlining your approach to personalized communications and channels. And, they typically pay for themselves. We helped a retail brand select and deploy a CDP and then developed an AI-driven CRM program that yielded more than a 200% increase in lifetime customer value – more than paying for itself in the first six months!

Is a CDP right for my brand?

With an average investment over $100,000, CDPs aren’t for everyone. Generally, brands with four or five channels are good candidates. CDPs make sense for both B2B and B2C brands – especially ones with a long sales cycle. Plus, you should be committed to investing in customer research as well as shifting away from a campaign-based approach to a more sophisticated engagement management model.

Bottom line

CDPs are for brands interested in the long game and long-term customer relationships. The best CDPs are continually growing and customizing to follow channel usage trends. And, if you do invest in a CDP, make sure you’ve got the right partner with the smarts to help you not only pick the right tool, but also get the most out of it.

Contact TJ to learn more about what a CDP can do for your bottom line.

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MARC USA Director of Data Science Josh MacCarty Wins DMN’s 2019 40UNDER40 Award

corpdev_admin — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 19:29:05 +0000

News

MARC USA Director of Data Science Josh MacCarty Wins DMN’s 2019 40UNDER40 Award

MacCarty’s cutting-edge algorithms and methodologies solve complex client business challenges and drive growth

DMN, a leading provider of digital and data-driven marketing news, has recognized Josh MacCarty, MARC USA Director of Data Science, as one of the top 40 marketers under the age of 40 for 2019.

Winners of the 2019 DMN 40UNDER40 Award represent the marketing industry’s most extraordinary achievers in the business, all under the age of 40. The winners are selected by DMN’s editorial team for their innovation, impactful results and a stellar career trajectory.

“Josh joined MARC USA four years ago and has made a significant impact from day one,” said TJ Crawford, SVP/ Director of Digital Strategy, MarTech & Analytic Solutions.

“He uses advanced analytics and machine learning to uncover not only the most efficient allocation of marketing dollars and highest value targets, but also the most effective messaging. He’s passionate about applying cutting-edge algorithms and analytical methodologies to understand and solve complex business and marketing questions that drive growth for clients.”

MacCarty is also the architect of MARC USA/Cogniscient Media proprietary measurement tools and expert in segmentation, modeling and attribution.

“The honorees chosen reflect the best of the best under 40 in the industry,” Kim Davis, DMN’s editor-in-chief, adds. “Whether they’re revolutionizing their brands or building winning teams and strategies, these are the marketers to watch.”

Additional information on award recipients can be found at DMN40UNDER40.com.

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5 ways to boost your email success

corpdev_admin — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 11:38:44 +0000

Blog

5 ways to boost your email success

Jenna Weinholtz, Digital Marketing Automation Specialist, defines the keys to better email engagement and impact.

Email marketing has the power to lead your customer acquisition and retention strategy. But what makes an email campaign successful? Here are 5 best practices to optimize your email marketing program and build better relationships with subscribers.

1. Succinct Subject Lines

Subject lines are your first impression — separating you from your competitors and determining if your emails are destined for the trash bin. Use no more than 35 characters to avoid being cut off in mobile inboxes. And, be sure to use your preview and preheader text to get your entire message into subscriber inboxes. Customers are looking for relevant, valuable content, so your subject line should be timely, clear and concise. Tip: Keep in mind the action you want your audience to take.

2. Live Text

Live text is hardcoded, web-safe text within an email that will always display a readable size. It helps drive higher deliverability rates and, most importantly, allows subscribers to read your emails on any device even when images are not displayed. Image-heavy emails can trigger spam filters and load slowly. Many ISPs automatically turn off images, leaving your subscribers in the dark about the message you’re trying to send. With live text, readers focus on your message and call to action — resulting in better engagement.

3. Mobile Responsiveness

Make sure your subscribers can easily consume your content any way they prefer — laptop at work, tablet at home or on their phone while in line for coffee. If they aren’t mobile-friendly, your emails will be quickly deleted and unsubscribe rates will increase. Since nearly half of all emails are read on mobile devices, always use a mobile-optimized email template with mobile-first design to ensure your subscribers can read and engage with your content. That means…

a cross-device compatible layout
font sizes larger than 16px
CTA buttons at least 50x50px for easy clickability
concise, scannable content

4. Personalization

Gone are the days when you can create one email design and deploy it to your entire database. Customers want relevant content that means something to them and gives them the benefits promised for subscribing to your emails. If you don’t deliver, the authenticity of your brand will suffer and the relationship with your contacts will be stagnant in comparison to competitors who are effectively personalizing content. Here’s how to do it.

Audience Personalization: Use dynamic content to change the imagery and message within your emails based on subscriber data. By analyzing behavior, interests, location, etc., you can create segmented lists and target relevant messages to individuals. Subscribers also self-segment through email preference centers — telling you their interests, the content they want and their preferred message frequency. Listen to them.
Product Recommendations: Integrate your subscriber’s recent purchase or browsing history into emails to increase purchases through cross-sell and up-sell recommendations.
Send-Time Optimization: Use this feature within most ESPs to communicate with your subscribers at their optimal time. By analyzing a subscriber’s past mailing activity, you can send emails at the exact time and day that subscriber is most likely to view their inbox and engage. The result — higher open and click through rates.

5. Automated Programs

Automation features like multi-step campaigns, lead scoring and analytics make email much more powerful. Take advantage of automation to monitor every digital interaction a subscriber has with your brand, welcome new subscribers, launch an email series to nurture customer relationships or trigger an email as a result of their website action. Bottom line: automation lets you engage more subscribers, lead them down the sales funnel and increase ROI and revenue.

Curious about enhancing your current email strategy? Contact Jenna to explore ways to strengthen your relationships with subscribers.

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Power your CRM personalization strategy with these 5 key data types

corpdev_admin — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 15:09:17 +0000

Blog

Power your CRM personalization strategy with these 5 key data types

Jenny Brenner, Manager of Digital Strategy & CRM Solutions, explores how to use your brand’s data to increase relevance and ROI.

It’s no secret that customers expect personalization when brands talk to them. Yet, it must be personalization that’s relevant to them. Just using their first name is not enough. When you get it right, you can increase marketing effectiveness, improve interactions along the customer lifecycle and drive long-term retention, loyalty and brand advocacy. But your personalization strategy is only as strong as the data you use to inform communications at each touchpoint.

Here are 5 types of actionable data to power your brand’s personalization strategy:

1. Demographic & Attribute-Based
When you craft a personalization strategy, the first place to start is with what you already know. Use the customer profile information you have to address them on an individual basis as well as any available demographics and segmentation to start tailoring messaging and experiences. For contacts without segments, turn to lead scores and build processes to complete the missing information.

2. Online Interaction
A wealth of information is created each time a customer visits one of your brand’s digital properties. Both active and passive online interactions can help increase personalization.

Active online interactions are typically user-driven in exchange for a benefit or response and tend to act as a hand raise. For example, completing an online purchase, email preference center or contact form or subscribing or interacting with your social media properties are active online interactions that can inform both new touchpoints along the customer lifecycle and current marketing to that individual.

Passive online interactions are observed actions like engagement with digital media, SMS, email or your app or browse behavior on your website. These actions not only provide context for content interests, but they also can inform other areas of personalization strategy such as communication timing, frequency and channel preference.

When considering any online interactions for personalization — active or passive — make sure to also consider the inverse of the interaction and any actions that may have been abandoned during the process. Personalization based on action drop-off, if timed and messaged correctly, can contribute to powerful business results.

3. Offline Interaction
Depending on your business model, offline interaction data may or may not be more robust than online action data. The most common offline data stems from operational systems used to support the business that also associate with your customer. Examples include store purchase or point of sale (POS) data, sales force contact and activities, product return cycles, appointment management, customer service and call center inquiries.

4. Environmental
Don’t overlook environmental factors when building a personalization strategy. Understanding each customer’s environment and tailoring their experience to it can help create relevance — and value. Think about what factors influence your customers. Geolocation or weather data can provide context clues for their environments when they aren’t at one of your physical locations and add another level of relevance to your messaging.

5. Derived
Leveraging the above data types can give you a powerful advantage, especially when they are combined. Layering in additional information from 3rd party sources or deriving new information via predictive analytics can uncover new insights and provide further opportunities to personalize.

For example, overlaying competitive shopping behavior can help you understand your share of each customer’s wallet and guide personalized offers to mitigate defection, while propensity modeling around a specific product can inform new up-sell or cross-sell touchpoints.

No matter the data types you use, make sure your CRM personalization strategy spans channels to maximize effectiveness. Curious about enhancing your current strategy or expanding into other channels? Contact Jenny to dive in together!

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Joe Burke Named Chief Creative Officer

corpdev_admin — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 21:34:11 +0000

News

Joe Burke Named Chief Creative Office

Responsible for agency-wide creative leadership

Joe Burke has been promoted to EVP/ Chief Creative Officer. Joe, who joined MARC USA in 2011 and was formerly Executive Creative Director in the Chicago office, now has oversight of creative across offices in Boston, Chicago and Pittsburgh.

MARC USA President Cari Bucci Hulings says, “Joe is the ideal creative. He’s a truly gifted storyteller, but just as important, he’s such a great leader and genuinely good person — committed to mentoring and developing talent.”

Joe’s resume includes creative leadership roles at DDB, Element 79, FCB and JWT prior to MARC USA. Perhaps, best known for the iconic, multi-award-winning “Is It in You?” campaign for Gatorade, Joe has been helping consumers fall in love with brands for more than 25 years. In addition to Gatorade, his wide range of experience includes work on Rite Aid, True Value, Payless ShoeSource, Ruby Tuesday, Navistar, Quaker Oats, Life Cereal, Capitol One, Frito-Lay, Coors and American Family Insurance.

Joe has won all the top creative awards but says he’s most proud of his multiple EFFIEs and the real business results he has achieved for his clients. He adds, “I love the entrepreneurial vibe at MARC USA. From the day I got here, the agency has honored entrepreneurialism and independence — always brave and always seeing brands in fresh, new ways. These are critical factors in making great work happen.”

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Tap into the Underdog Principle to create brand fanatics

corpdev_admin — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 16:38:38 +0000

Blog

Tap into the Underdog Principle to create brand fanatics

Todd Fabian, Director of Market Research, and Brenda Magnetti, Associate Director, Account Planning, look at how leveraging the Underdog Principle can pay off for brands large and small.

Yes. The Super Bowl is a showcase for world-class cities and football teams with the most elite athletes. And, high-performing, resilient teams give all they’ve got all season long to claim victory in the ultimate two-team throwdown where each puts it all on the line for hometown bragging rights and NFL history.

Yet, it’s not really about cheering on the best teams to take home the Lombardi Trophy. Is it?

Instead, it turns out, unless you’re from New England, it’s about rooting passionately for the underdog.

We can’t help ourselves. It’s a reflection of Behavioral Science and the way our brains work. And we’re not even aware of it because 95% of our decisions happen in our subconscious. We have an innate bias for equilibrium. When one team dominates, we want the other to win. When the leader stumbles and falls, we feel bad and switch our allegiances back.

Many smart marketers create value and reap commercial benefits by showing up as an underdog brand. Sprint acknowledges that its network is smaller but touts its much lower cost as a reason to switch. The current Buick campaign literally pokes fun at the fact that its image isn’t as stylish as its cars. The University of Phoenix taps this principle by overtly targeting people who identify as underdogs — the hardworking, less-privileged people with big ambitions.

Meaningful results? Absolutely. Those brands drive increased purchase intent, preferred choice and brand loyalty.

How to invoke the Underdog Principle

There are a few Behavioral Economics principles that can help you leverage Underdog status for your brand. Transparency, humility and self-deprecating humor are also tried and true strategies. Buick’s willingness to address the elephant in the room (and no, that’s not a comment on the cars) conveys honesty and gives people permission to reconsider the brand. Transparency is also a powerful appeal. Consider Domino’s return to popularity by confessing its prior quality lapses.

The principle of Own Team Bias states that when we share some kind of identity with a group of people, we automatically and immediately feel positive toward them. This principle has most often been used to explain unconscious racial bias, but brands are also using it to invoke a stronger emotional connection with their targets.

Several Super Bowl advertisers leverage this principle by connecting their brand to a “team,” or in this case, a cause, with which their target wants to identify. Instead of selling cars during the Super Bowl using famous faces and spending millions on a celebrity, Kia is using its ad time to launch The Great Unknowns Scholarship, which promises to “help young people in need get a foothold in higher education.”

Perennial Super Bowl advertiser Verizon is dialing up last year’s tribute to First Responders. This year’s work includes 12 vignettes about NFL players and coaches who wouldn’t be playing football if it weren’t for the heroic efforts of First Responders. Interestingly, this is also a nod to the principle of Loss Aversion — imagine what we might have lost if not for those First Responders.

Ironically, one might even say that President Trump leveraged these strategies for his “brand” when he classified himself as an outsider, touting his lack of experience in Washington and flouting his lack of concern over being politically correct. The approach may be polarizing, but there’s no doubt it has endeared him to his “team.”

Bottom line

So, whether it’s during the Super Bowl or any other time, brands both large and small can invoke the Underdog Principle to advantage — one that can last all year long. That is, unless you’re the Patriots.

Also published in MediaPost.

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The connection between AI and Decision Science: How they influence each other and your customers

corpdev_admin — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 15:11:11 +0000

Blog

The connection between AI and Decision Science:
How they influence each other and your customers

Our Analytics and Insights experts share their favorite reads on these vital topics in today’s marketplace.

In today’s marketing environment, AI is making vast quantities of data all the more accessible and actionable. At the same time, Decision Science — particularly Behavioral Economics — helps us understand consumers’ unconscious biases so we can make better use of the data to eliminate barriers and activate triggers to consumer choice on behalf of brands and causes.

To help you get the New Year off to a great start, we’re providing a deeper look into both AI and Behavioral Economics through curated insights from some of our favorite experts in these field.

First, find out why you really act as you do. Boston University’s Dr. Carey Morewedge provides this fascinating read on unconscious biases in The Atlantic.

Next here’s a deep dive into AI from MIT. We promise you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see how AI works, how it can be applied and how much we should rely on it.

Finally, here’s an unsettling look from the Los Angeles Times at how unconscious biases can creep into AI to influence machine learning and perpetuate these biases.

We’d love to hear your feedback, and we’re ready to put our Decision Science and AI tools to work for you. To learn more, just contact Josh MacCarty, Director of Data Science.

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Cari Bucci Hulings Named MARC USA President

corpdev_admin — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 13:19:00 +0000

News

Cari Bucci Hulings Named MARC USA President

Responsible for Boston, Chicago and Pittsburgh offices, including Cogniscient Media

“Cari is ideally suited to lead MARC USA and our next generation of leaders,” MARC USA CEO Michele Fabrizi noted. “She is passionately committed to growing her clients’ business. She brings an intuitive grasp of data and decision science that enables her to understand what motivates her targets at every step of their purchase journey. She’s just as passionate about helping people grow and is a true collaborator and partner — with clients, colleagues and in the larger community.”

In her eight years at MARC USA, Cari has played an integral role in the agency’s growth as a direct result of the growth of her clients’ business. She is known for building results-driven marketing programs for MARC USA clients with breakthrough creative and media strategies. She has also championed our expanding capabilities in research and analytics and was the principal architect of the launch of Cogniscient Media.

Prior to joining MARC USA, Cari was an SVP/Group Account Director at FCB. Her wide industry expertise includes retail, financial services, insurance, healthcare, CPG, telecommunications and manufacturing.

Direct Marketing News honored Cari on their Top 40 under 40 list in 2014, and the Chicago Business Journal named her a Woman of Influence in 2017. She is a Board Member of the Illinois chapter of Make-A-Wish.

Michele Fabrizi continues in her role as CEO and as does Tony Bucci as Chairman.

See related article in Adweek

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AI makes media measurement smarter, faster and cheaper

corpdev_admin — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 20:23:53 +0000

Blog

AI makes media measurement
smarter, faster and cheaper

Josh MacCarty, Director of Data Science, explains why AI-driven Reinforcement Learning beats A/B testing

Measurement is a fundamental part of any marketing strategy. Yet, A/B testing, the current measurement go-to — with its hidden costs and stringent time requirements — isn’t good enough. Instead, by applying cutting-edge AI techniques like Reinforcement Learning to media, we can deliver faster, cheaper, more agile and more actionable insights.

Why we need better measurement
How often have you asked: What’s the incremental impact of my marketing? What’s the ROI? If we can’t measure it, should we do it? How are we maximizing the impact of every dollar? Wouldn’t these customers buy anyway? How can we tie our media to the bottom line? Aren’t these tests expensive and slow?

To optimize the impact of media and marketing, you need to calculate ROI. To calculate ROI, you need to measure the impact. To measure, you need to test – which generally means a serious commitment of time and energy.

In A/B testing, you design an experiment, say emailing a coupon to your CRM audience. To get a read on the coupon effect, you must hold out a group that doesn’t receive the coupon. Ostensibly, you see the impact of the coupon by comparing response rates between your test and control groups. You test, you learn, you make changes and improve. Repeat ad nauseum.

What’s wrong with this picture? Every test holdout has an opportunity cost. You’re giving up the opportunity to touch them with your media — potentially leaving money on the table. A/B testing is also inflexible, with hard time requirements. Want to change your test halfway through? Nope. Want insights sooner? Too bad. A/B testing is not scalable. The more things you want to test, the greater your opportunity cost and time delay.

Reinforcement Learning — a new way forward
Recent applications of modern machine learning, specifically Reinforcement Learning, allow us to test, measure and optimize all within the same framework. Two key concepts motivate Reinforcement Learning — exploiting and exploring. Reinforcement Learning enables us to exploit our current knowledge (e.g. deploying what we believe is the best treatment or creative) while exploring other options (other creative, other treatments) in a dynamic, largely automated fashion.

Here’s a real world example of exploit vs. explore. When you eat out, do you try new restaurants or hit the same spots over and over? If you explore new restaurants too much, you’re missing out on how much you enjoy your favorites. Yet, if you only hit your favorites, you’re missing out on new restaurants that may blow your go-to out of the water. This trade off, in machine learning terms, is conceptualized as exploiting (your favorite spots) and exploring (new restaurants).

Systematizing exploit vs. explore
Let’s say you have a handful of creative options to serve. If you serve just the one you think is best, you may think you’re optimizing. BUT, you’re closing yourself off to other creative options that may have more impact, especially under different customer or contextual circumstances. On the flip side, if you’re blindly cycling through creative options, you’re never identifying and delivering the creative with the greatest impact — leaving money on the table.

Creative option testing is just one area to exploit and explore, but the concept applies elsewhere — think vendor budgets, CRM contacts, products/promotions/pricing options, predictive models (next best product, response modeling). The list goes on.

The beauty of Reinforcement Learning is that it systematizes exploit vs. explore to optimize your KPIs. The process learns continually, balancing exploit vs. explore to get a measurement on each variable you want to test while minimizing opportunity cost, delivering results on a continuous basis, being flexible (you can add/remove variables) and scales easily with measurement complexity. In other words, it addresses all the pitfalls of A/B testing.

The bottom line
At MARC USA’s Cogniscient Media, we apply a wide range of machine learning and AI processes like Reinforcement Learning, predictive modeling, natural language processing and econometrics to optimize marketing and media. Don’t get stuck doing what you’ve always done. It’s time to exploit and explore.

Reach out to Josh today to see how machine learning can help you optimize your creative, media, CRM and customer strategies.

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Decision Science makes Artificial Intelligence… more intelligent

corpdev_admin — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 20:10:20 +0000

Blog

Decision Science makes
Artificial Intelligence… more intelligent

Lisa Tristano Martin, Associate Director of PR/Social Engagement, examines how applying known principles of Decision Science to AI helps us better understand and use the data

Using technology to better target consumers is nothing new but applying it to predict their future behavior can take your game to the next level. With Artificial Intelligence (AI), you can see patterns in virtually limitless amounts of data. But it still takes strategic insight to make sense of the behaviors, and this is where Decision Science sheds critical light.

Enabling personalized messages

AI gives Amazon the ability to recommend products we’d like or tell us what else others also bought with the products we’ve already selected. It enables West Elm and Sherwin Williams to mine our Pinterest boards and recommend which of their many products best match our style. In short, AI makes it practical for these brands to offer highly personalized shopping experiences by leveraging their shoppers’ unconscious preferences.

Removing barriers and activating triggers

But to convert those suggestions into purchases requires a clear-eyed view of the barriers and triggers impacting customer motivations. With all its power, AI is still about the WHAT. Decision Science unlocks the WHY — helping us understand and remove barriers in order to activate triggers. Decision Science, and specifically Behavioral Economics, help explain the many seemingly irrational choices each of us makes on a daily basis — choices made at an unconscious level driven by factors we aren’t aware are in play.

For Amazon, West Elm and Sherwin Williams, AI and Decision Science team up to overcome two barriers to purchases explained by Behavioral Economics — Choice Overload and Fear of Regret. Numerous studies have shown that having too many choices makes decisions more difficult — and even the outcomes less satisfying. Couple that with the fear of regret – fear of making the wrong decision — and you can see why the availability of hundreds of bird feeders, lamps or shades of gray can literally paralyze shoppers.

Yet, imagine the sigh of relief when the choices are reduced to a special few — ones that you’re told align perfectly with the things you already love and are signs of your great sense of style. Add in the approval of others for choosing various items together — a great application of yet another Behavioral Economics principle known as Social Proof — and you’ve not only sealed the deal, you’ve boosted basket size.

Disrupting the status quo

The combination of AI and Decision Science impacts choice in many categories — from home products to areas of greater consequence, like healthcare. Warby Parker is using this powerful duo to overcome both Fear of Regret and Default Bias. Already a category disrupter with its “try five pairs at home for free model” — a great way to dispel fear of regret, Warby Parker uses AI to recommend frames for you out of multiple options based on a short quiz.

Then they up the ante with more technology — their prescription check app. In the optical world whoever owns the prescription is most likely to sell the glasses. To overcome the tendency to default to the existing eye doctor’s retail channel, Warby Parker offers a mobile refraction service. You spend about 20 minutes with your smart phone and laptop on their eye test; then an eye doctor reviews the results.

If your current prescription is good, they write you a prescription you can use anywhere — but, ideally with them. If there’s an issue, they recommend a visit to an eye doctor. It sure takes the pain out of picking new frames — helping propel Warby Parker from a start-up to a billion-dollar brand.

The bottom line

While some of the most obvious examples of AI and Decision Science come from online retailers, the combination is just as powerful offline. In fact, the bricks and mortar retailers who thrive will be the ones creating unique, personalized experiences that flow seamlessly from online to in-store and vice versa. Next time we’ll look at some of them. And we’ll also look at how Decision Science is the secret sauce that makes all AI-driven media, including programmatic, not only more efficient but also far more effective in driving real business results.

Do you have a good example of AI and Decision Science in action? We’d love to hear about it and, if you’re willing, feature it in our next newsletter. You don’t want to miss what’s coming next.

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