Columbia, MD, July 2, 2013

Merkle Publishes It Only Looks Like Magic Analytics Book

Merkle (www.merkle.com), a leading customer relationship marketing (CRM) firm and the nation’s largest privately held agency, today announced the availability of a new book, It Only Looks Like Magic, written by members of the analytics group at Merkle. In a world where customer centric organizations have the marketing edge, advanced analytics is the driving force behind customer experiences. This book reveals how to work with data and technology to power real-time personalized marketing.

Big data technology and customer centric digital analytics are changing the way marketers are and can interact with audiences. While the need for advanced analytics is evolving and advancing rapidly, organizations that can harness the power of analytics can move ahead of their competition. It Only Looks Like Magic focuses on how to create a 360-degree view of the customer by integrating online and offline data; how to gather knowledge to reach the target audiences at the right time; how to monetize insights and customer segments and how to allocate marketing budgets by accurately attributing marketing successes across multiple customer touch points.

“Our book is written by analytic professionals for analytic professionals. We focus on best practices, real-world examples and provide the tools and technologies around how to handle the data and leverage it in a way that can help marketers make better decisions,” said Jennifer Veesenmeyer, vice president, Merkle. “The book’s purpose is to enlighten analytical minds to the power of a fully coordinated effort to use multichannel data to drive insights, measurement and decisioning that create optimal outcomes.”

“As leader of Merkle’s world-class team of 300 advanced-degreed statisticians and data scientists, I am incredibly proud of the work that this team has done in It Only Looks Like Magic.  This is a testament to the power and importance of analytics in customer centricity and underscores that big data is not new to us at Merkle, it is part of our DNA,” said Zhengda “Z” Shen, executive vice president, Merkle. “Together, our data scientists, statisticians, and quantitative gurus have written this book for analysts to enable them with the tools of making the promise of big data a reality.”