R in Digital Marketing Production with Extendo and ixpantia

Extendo, operating as MiWeb in North America, is a digital marketing organization that specializes in data-driven marketing strategy. As large platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon dominate the digital marketing space, the Extendo team wanted to deliver beyond traditional descriptive analysis of platform data, and offer predictive insights that were based on serious data science.

“We came to understand that we needed to evolve our data analysis and the products of this analysis to include predictive analysis that could use advanced statistical methods to impact not only our clients’ decision-making processes, but be used as models to directly affect changes in their marketing processes.”

As a result, they teamed up with RStudio Full Service Partner, ixpantia, to architect an environment with RStudio Connect that utilized Shiny app visualizations for their clients’ digital marketing needs, improve their data modeling skills, and craft scalable and repeatable DataOps workflows between their data engineering and data science teams. Hear their conversation on how they made it all possible, and what’s in the future for Extendo’s digital ecosystem.

The Extendo data science and data engineering teams understood they would need to have a clearer understanding of the digital marketing ecosystem and the data sources and structures most commonly employed by their clients. They realized that the intersection of their data science and data engineering teams would require new workflows and tools, and a closer relationship to the public cloud providers to collect, transform, and activate their clients’ data strategies.

Ultimately they came to understand that to win in this space, they would need more robust tooling and to become proficient in DataOps, ixpantia’s take on serious data science, and that this would require outside help.

The primary issues were:

• Problems delivering their service vision of actionable insights
• Problems complying with new GDPR privacy environments
• Problems with developing their own competencies for Serious Data Science

“RStudio has facilitated our growth as a team, providing us an orderly and scalable environment for our data engineers and data scientists to work together. Our clients have benefitted from this process as the data products we deliver are better built and better withstand the test of time.”

ixpantia was the change agent for the Extendo team. In terms of learning best practices with RStudio, ixpantia:

• Taught the philosophy of DataOps for serious data science: creating and documenting projects, the value of open-source tooling, reproducibility, and version control.
• Designed and taught them about the microservices architecture most suited to their work in deploying data products for digital marketing.
• Taught them robust new architectures and code for developing interactive data visualization applications that use Shiny and RStudio Connect.