Executives for a very large largest telecommunications provider, looking carefully at their marketing process, realized they had no true owner of customer information. While some analytic resources had been hired, people working in analytics spent a significant percentage of their time manipulating data and didn't recognize new sources of data, both behavioral and attitudinal, that could affect results. The company had more than 20 different databases and little in the way of true analytics that could help them make predictions. And the average time to market, from concept to program execution, was more than four months—not including time for creative development.
Their solution? Outsourcing many of their direct marketing functions.
In general, marketers are good at managing their operational systems in-house on a day-to-day basis. But the skills used to create day-to-day analyses and marketing platforms are different from those needed to assess the more...
