The University of Montana will be hosting an innovative new forum on one of the hottest emerging business techniques – marketing analytics – on Sept. 17-18, featuring expert presenters from companies around the country. The inaugural QuestMT event will give managers and others who need insights from their marketing data the tools they can use to understand and develop the power of analytics.
"It's a forum that is designed to give professionals in the field cutting-edge training in this new area of marketing analytics," said Jakki Mohr, a Regents professor of marketing and a distinguished faculty fellow at the University of Montana's School of Business Administration.
A team of marketing faculty at UM, in conjunction with an external advisory board, has planned and organized the event.
The forum, which will be held all day on the UM campus on Friday, Sept. 18 and preceded by an evening reception at the Holiday Inn Downtown outdoor patio on Sept. 17, is open to anybody who wants to know how to use data the right way.
"This is even for people who graduated five or 10 years ago or who don't have a marketing degree," Mohr explained. "Everyone knows they have all this data in their company, whether from the company website or the Twitter feed or the customer database. You have metrics on who is visiting the website, things like that. The question is how do you link that data to the ways your company makes decisions on what to do? How do you use that to prioritize advertising spending or how do they innovate new products? All of those decisions should be based on the data the company has, but people don't have the skill set to make that leap."
The forum will feature talks and question-and-answer sessions from a variety of experts, including:
• Paul Roetzer, CEO of PR2020, a marketing agency that provides performance-driven marketing services and author of the "Marketing Performance Blueprint."
• Jane Crisan, chief operations officer and president of R2C Group, an agency specializing in the intersection of direct, sales-driven marketing and brand advertising.
• Young-Bean Song, principal at Analytics DNA, a Seattle-based strategy and analytics consultancy.
• John Chandler, clinical professor of marketing at UM and principal of Data Insights, a consultancy addressing hard business questions with data science to unearth actionable insights.
• Jason Hoffman, CEO of ARS Quanta, a company specializing in both the art and the science of quantitative modeling of business problems to drive growth, revenue and profit.
• Maziar Sattari, vice president of product development at Turn, a Silicon Valley-based software company providing a digital advertising hub that offers real-time insights for marketing decision making.
The last three presenters will conduct the afternoon training session called "Learning to Talk the Talk with your Data Scientist," where participants will learn the most important techniques that data scientists use to research business questions, how these tools fare when introduced into the organization and the most applicable algorithms used across multiple industries.
"Data scientists talk a totally different language than practicing managers," Mohr explained. "We will have a training session where a data scientist will come in with his client and say 'here's how I looked at their data.' They'll talk all about the lexicon in the field, things like 'distributed computing.' When you hire a data scientist, this is their world but the manager has no idea what they're doing. They get data back and know it's useful but don't know how to use it. How do you put it in a format that is comprehensible to a person who isn't technical? This will provide that link between the analysis and what the organization needs to do differently. It's something where people will say 'oh yeah, that makes sense.'"
Mohr said that the whole idea of the one-day forum structure is to create a fast-paced networking event where people can gain new insight and take away something useful.
"It's priced where companies can bring in teams," she added. "A lot of times companies send just one person, but it typically takes a team so you have a shared lexicon and shared values. The idea of a one-person army doesn't work. It needs to permeate across the company."
She said the group that planned the event researched similar national conferences and tailored the program based on the input they received.
"Compared to what we were doing in marketing 10 years ago, we are on the edge of what is best in class at the best universities now," Mohr said.
Early-bird registration ends Monday, Aug. 24. For more information on the schedule or to register, visit questmt.co.
Source: Marketing analytics forum coming to Missoula
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