Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Give me some examples of a typical client situation.

Anil Kaul: For example, our client wanted to optimize their advertising spend. This was a company here in the Bay Area. It’s an online company and they had been doing a lot of spending. At some point in time, they decided to run a TV campaign. The TV campaign was very successful, but they were not able to figure out what part of sales was being driven by TV versus what they had been doing online. We helped them understand that as well as optimize their spend.

They have a marketing budget of about $250 million. One of the big issues there was they thought that TV is not as successful as we showed it to be. They cut their budget on TV spending. What we were able to show them was that over half of their search traffic was coming because of their TV advertising campaign. They continued supporting their TV spend, which they wouldn’t have done otherwise.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of third-party technologies did you need to use to come to that conclusion?

Anil Kaul: We used statistical software like SAS, R, and SPSS. These are the typical software that we use to run the various statistical analysis that we need to run.

Sramana Mitra: There’s no other product form the vast domain of software analytics?

Anil Kaul: It’s basically these three.

Sramana Mitra: Essentially, what you’re telling me is what you do is more McKinsey style work of solving a problem using data and analytics, but you’re really brought in to address certain core issues that the company is trying to solve.

Anil Kaul: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: When and how do you get these calls? When do people call you in and how do you get into projects?

Anil Kaul: There are two parts to it. One is, we have on-going relationships with our clients. Most of our clients tend to be large multinational companies. What happens in those cases is you help them solve problems for one country or one brand. A lot of our growth comes from our existing clients only.

The second is as Big Data becomes a big issue that everybody talks about, they realize that they need somebody to help them do analysis. Those are the situations where they start looking out for help because building the capabilities takes time and it’s not easy. You always don’t have all the skills internally. That is when they connect with us. Now, we have a sales and marketing team in place. In the early days, it used to be networking.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata
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