As Internet memes go, one stands out as pretty good advice: Skip to the good stuff, a.k.a. the Wadsworth Constant

I know you’re busy, so I’ll explain it quickly: The Wadsworth Constant states that you can easily jump past the first 30% of any YouTube video and be assured of missing the inevitable build-up, the talky, pointless chatter before the main event — the guy falling …

Two months ago, I wrote an overview of our research paper on multi-touch attribution. The premise of the post was that although attribution measurement for digital advertising has come a long way in the last year, the attribution space is still fragmented and, to be frank, a bit confusing. We proposed three guiding principles that we think will enable multi-touch attribution to be a core part of every …

It is with great pride that we get to announce that our own Chief Scientist, Claudia Perlich, has once again taken home a coveted prize at this year’s ACM KDD conference.  Her paper, “Leakage in Data Mining: Formulation, Detection and Avoidance,” co-authored with two exceptional statisticians at Tel-Aviv University, has won the best paper award at the 2011 KDD conference.  The competition for …

As a follow-up to Tom Phillips’s post on the marketing implications of our first implementation of Non-Invasive Causal Estimation (NICE), this post concerns why it is important and actionable to estimate causal effects using observational data. The NICE methodology is explained in our recently published paper, and the results presented in Tom’s post are an extension of that analysis. I will be presenting the findings of …

One of our brilliant new data scientists decided to see whether some of the work he had done in epidemiology to determine the efficacy of disease treatments could be adapted to measure the impact of advertising.  What started as an academic exercise has produced a treasure trove of insights into the impact of digital advertising, and how ad effectiveness varies with targeting methods and creative strategies.
But as excited as we …