Consulting: What are clients demanding in this new analytics space?

Walker: If you imagine a Venn Diagram where clients want to have three different kinds of help: They want to have help developing their own resources and capabilities to do this kind of work themselves, and be able to have folks like us equip them with the tools and training to do this 21st-Century kind of analytics in the marketing communication space. Sometimes they also want to be able to ask (when there's a demand for work that can be done at a lower cost, at scale, perhaps with offshore resources) how can Prophet help them do that? That's the second part of the diagram. The third part is, occasionally there's a strategic project where you want an outside perspective for reasons of building a new strategic vision. What we're hearing from clients is an interesting three-legged stool of where they want these three things to work together.

Consulting: What do you think the market potential is for this new analytics practice?

Walker: Unlimited. I would certainly see analytics being at least as large as Prophet's Brand and Marketing practices. In terms of global market for analytics, absolutely unlimited as more and more data becomes available, and as the sheer grunt of computer power increases, the size of the market is just unlimited. This can certainly be a multi-billion dollar market.

Consulting: How will you be staffing these engagements?

Walker: We are doing a few things: hiring specialists from industry, from financial services, as well as taking from our existing resources. We're going to be focused on new types of models and new technologies and processes that will be differentiated into the analytics we do. I don't think anyone else can take marketing analytics and turn it into recommendations that can get a marketing team organized in the same way we do. It's going to be an interesting combination of super-hardcore analytics resources partnered with a brand and marketing firm at Prophet.

Analytics' 'Unlimited' Potential

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