Paula Fedoris, chief analytics officer at Draftfcb, discusses her new role, and the role analytics plays in building customer loyalty.
Direct Marketing News (DMN): What exactly is the role of chief analytics officer?
Paula Fedoris (Draftfcb): We’re trying to make sure the client gets the business impact they deserve from all our marketing activities and their investment. What new opportunities are we identifying? How can we make sure we’re optimizing the performance of these activities? The way to orchestrate success is to make sure our strategies are well-informed. When we get involved in engagements for the clients, it’s about how much money do they need to invest to achieve business goals. They want to make sure they’re getting a positive ROI. Within corporate America, due to the economic situation, everyone wants the most efficient marketing activities possible.
DMN: What is your short-term mission?
Fedoris: We have a tremendous amount of talent and resources here. We need to elevate that within the organization and make it more visible and ultimately make sure it’s world class. Because I have interesting insights into what others are doing, I’m trying to build something that will help differentiate what we do and make our work better. We have a very sizeable team in the Chicago office. We have a sizeable team here in New York. I’m still trying to get my arms around all of the players involved and then I’ll come up with my hundred-day plan.
DMN: You mentioned measuring performance analytics as part of your role. Are there other types of analytics that clients are interested in?
Fedoris: If I were to rattle off all the different deliverables, wow. Segmentation will be important. Predictive modeling, business modeling, media analytics and website analytics. We’re going to be looking at the effectiveness and efficiency of messaging and creative. We will also be ultimately dealing with certain strategic marketing questions for the client and picking up where other management consulting partners [left off]. This role goes beyond what people think of when they hear the word analytics. I prefer the words impact and optimization to measurement.
DMN: How about social analytics? Is it possible to truly understand what happens in the social sphere?
Fedoris: Social intelligence mining is critical. Not only do we look at the conversations taking place, but then we must make sure we identify the human insights into what that intelligence gives us. There’s a business story we can glean, but we can also quantify the impact. The tools are getting better all the time. We deal with Radian6 and a couple of other tools. We’ve got to [perfect] how we deploy those tools to the benefit of our clients.
DMN: Can brands leverage analytics to build customer loyalty, or is it only about optimizing campaigns?
Fedoris: One of the key cornerstones of Draft and our methodologies is the customer-decision journey and being able to map key performance indiciators and performance metrics along the customer decision journey. That journey is the old CRM journey, the customer pathway: following the consumer even before [product] consideration all the way to ultimately the social aspect where we can amplify the voice of the social consumer.
