Converge: Transforming Business at the Intersection of Marketing and Technology

innovate? It typically won’t come from huge, enterprise-level transformations. Retail is one space where the lab setup has worked well.

He oversaw a project called Dreamcatcher that was a big bet on textual analytics, a systematic effort to determine patterns in all of the personal information and stories collected throughout the campaign, from a canvasser’s clipboard to a call center conversation to the Share Your Story function on the campaign website.

customized campaigns for the individual based on models to determine what kind of marketing stream (direct mail versus e-mail versus banner ads) makes sense for what kind of customer.

“a single massive system that could merge the information collected from pollsters, fund-raisers, field workers, and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states.”

In the first quarter of 2011, Facebook was tops, supplying 88 percent of traffic. Pinterest was at just 1 percent. Within a year, Facebook had dropped to 60 percent, while Pinterest had surged to 26 percent.

be served dynamically and reused across segments. If you’re working with a forward-thinking agency,

Using actual shoppers at the Seattle flagship store, the team was able to work out the bugs and sniff out additional functionality in real time.

On the day of the nuptials, the peak volume that Google Apps Engine processed was 2,000 page requests per second.

The Pebble e-watch grabbed headlines when it became the largest Kickstarter project ever, raising more than $10 million from 68,000 backers.