Rob Saker's Blog

I’ve been looking forward to this summit for a while.  My primary objective in attending the summit this year is to learn more about how we can potentially move to a more integrated use of IRI data.  There are many technical and business processes that need to be identified and resolved prior to any advanced usage of information.I’ll be looking at the predictive analytics, consumer tracking and targeting, and pricing breakouts. These are the issues that are facing the CPG industry right now.

Morning Session

Tuesday morning saw the obligatory introductory speeches and advertisements by IRI bigwigs.  IRI may be in contention with InfoUSA in their ad quality.

Made it through the new president of IRI’s presentation disappointed.  For a Salesforce.com alum, I expected a more dynamic speech.  It was muddled, without a point, and dragged on.

Joan Chow was up next.  Kudos to Kevin Doohan’s Interactive Marketing team and the ISS Marketing team.  StartMakingChoices (entire campaign) was prominently displayed.  It talked about the book, campaign, instore events, everything.

…Just want to take a moment and say that attending these conferences makes me truly appreciate the people I work with.  We started from nothing just a few years ago, and across our areas have developed some truly advanced capabilities.  I don’t think there are many companies that have the same level of understanding as we do.  I’ll overhear other attendees saying, “how did they do that,” or asking very basic questions.  We talk about raising the level of conversation and understanding within the company - and it’s a fair assessment that we aren’t there as a company overall - but I also recognize that we have a very gifted team and are working on some very progressive stuff.

Back to the conference, the next presenter was Rob Price from CVS Pharmacy.   Price has a loyalty program with 50 million subscribers, and over 1 billion coupons printed each year.   With a program of that scale you can quickly measure changes.  It was interesting to see how they use segmentation to drive results with that database.

Great presentation by Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s.  His organization was the focus of the book, “Moneyball.”  The Oakland A’s have a roster of about $60 million, competing against organizations with rosters 4-5 times as large.  Whether intentionally or not, Beane illustrated the key to any analytics system.  Regardless the sophistication of the systems, it comes down to a person identifying the key relevant metrics. His approach was to take as much data as possible and find correlations.

Funniest stat mentioned was, “don’t draft anybody from states with less than 17 electoral votes.”  Evidently in his analysis, he found no successful prospects from small states. He believes teams are better off drafting players unseen from large population centers, than signing supposedly good talents from small states.  He admits that in the end, this knowledge is not a sustainable advantage. It has provided him an advantage, and he is trying to translate that into more revenue so he can more effectively compete.

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