Today’s top contenders in the digital marketing and advertising market have a new set of challenges in creating and managing brands. Now, with an abundance of data at their fingertips, agencies are learning how to leverage their customers’ internal data to message and communicate brands and products more effectively. To further strengthen their efforts, they are tapping into technologies that allow them to leverage massive data streams from social and other web sources. Learn more at http://infochimps.com

1. Digital Agency Turbocharges Social Listening
and Insights with the Infochimps Platform
CASE STUDY
Today’s top contenders in the digital marketing and advertising market
have a new set of challenges in creating and managing brands. Now,
with an abundance of data at their fingertips, agencies are learning how
to leverage their customers’ internal data to message and communicate
brands and products more effectively. To further strengthen their efforts,
they are tapping into technologies that allow them to leverage massive
We had realized data streams from social and other web sources.
that the most
Meet Agency X*, one of the world’s top ad agencies with global brand
profitable 20% management of a number of Fortune 500 accounts. Agency X has a
of our projects proprietary social media listening and insights offering, powered by
were reporting technologies like Radian6 among others that allows them to acquire and
process data to visualize and present brand performance metrics and
and data related. statistics. Agency X’s social media listening gathers information from
social sites, like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and more, while the insights
It was clear offering aggregates metrics from a number of sources including Google
Analytics, Facebook Insights and Omniture. Ultimately, the organization
we needed to was looking to unify their data platforms and offer their team members
double down in push-button reporting.
this area and we
quickly discov-
ered Infochimps
was the right
partner to build
it out.
- VP - Analytics, Agency X
*Agency X’s name has been protected in this case study to protect their competitive
advantage and intellectual property.
© 2012 Infochimps, Inc. All rights reserved. 1

2. CASE STUDY
Vision
Diversification. Like many of the top agencies, Repeatability. Agency X is considered a leader
Agency X is always looking for ways to offer in out-of-the-box thinking when it comes to new
more services to differentiate themselves from projects, it’s their bread and butter. However,
their peers and create more value. The best and this can put a lot of stress on the technical de-
largest agencies don’t focus on just one aspect velopment team responsible for implementing
of the advertising landscape, but have a whole these projects.
portfolio of tools and services they can bring to
bear - creating more value for their clients, and Every project seems like it’s breaking new
greater revenue opportunities for the agency, technical ground and there’s always a tight
beyond hourly billing for creative work. deadline, which means code gets written in a
one-off fashion, without long-term, repeated use
Early on Agency X realized the opportunity to in mind. And because actions can only be done
differentiate themselves and serve their cli- ad-hoc and by a technical resource, the account
ents better by creating a social media practice. teams can usually be left on their own when
Social media strategy and reporting are by now it comes to creating new reports through one
just one of the many ways Agency X operates esoteric tool after another.
a diversified portfolio of services that can help
their clients. After clients started asking for more Led by Agency X’s senior management, and
metrics and measurement around their social spearheaded by its CTO, the organization de-
media campaigns, Agency X adopted Radian6 cided it needed to develop a Platform - a con-
as a third party tool to help them with reports. sistent set of tools and processes for executing
Realizing the power of such a system to gener- similar projects. Its data and reporting projects
ate real value for themselves and their clients, were a natural first place to start, as many of
Agency X began looking for ways to have their the workflows and scripts involved were ripe
own proprietary solution which they could fur- for consolidation and automation. It was clear
ther customize and give themselves greater that clients and account teams would benefit
capabilities. greatly from push-button reporting and analyti-
cal capabilities, saving the technical teams the
effort, and getting insights to their clients in near
real-time.
© 2012 Infochimps, Inc. All rights reserved. 2

3. CASE STUDY
Profitability. With every new digital project Creativity. At Agency X, one argument against
that Agency X took on, technical and human bringing technology platforms in-house was that
risk had the potential creep up and eat into that the focus on locking down toolsets and process-
project’s margins. Stacking enough of these es could restrict the creative possibilities for
together meant Agency X could face signifi- the organization and the kinds of projects they
cant barriers to growing revenues and profits, could take on. Certain employees at Agency
as resources were tied up in projects that took X had experience with using legacy data plat-
longer than they should have and suck up more forms, being familiar with Business Intelligence
resources than budgeted. cubes and Relational Database Management
Systems, and bemoaned their rigidity and the
Revenues and profits are always on senior negative effects it would have on their client
management’s mind at Agency X. Leading up projects.
to working with Infochimps, Agency X realized
that a significant portion of their repeatable The CTO at Agency X knew that philosophi-
profits came from data pipelines and reporting cally, these arguments were wrong. Embrac-
related projects. By Agency X’s own account, ing a few constraints and simplifications in one
these were the 20% of projects that generated area of a business meant that other areas can
80% of their profits. It was clear to them they be even more freely creative in their solutions
should double their efforts in this area. - they can depend on the repeatable results
and build around them. On a practical level the
CTO knew the old-school Business Intelligence
tools wouldn’t work for his needs, and he began
evaluating the various big data technologies out
there to see what could offer the flexibility he
would still need within a solution.
© 2012 Infochimps, Inc. All rights reserved. 3

4. CASE STUDY
Challenges
Beyond the complex organizational challenges • Scalability and Elasticity. As content
in the way of moving Agency X into the future, increased to “Big Data” scale, existing SQL
there were a number of technical challenges databases were pushed to their limits.
that needed solved. As an example, for their • Analytics Feature Development. Senti-
social media reporting services their clients ment analysis, influence scores, and other
began asking for greater and greater insight derivative data are important features that
and simplification, including real-time analytics would greatly add to the overall value of
and sentiment analysis. Their teams struggled the listener and insights platform. However,
with scaling the underlying technology to deliver there wasn’t a common platform and tool
these solutions. set for these features to be developed and
scaled out.
Key challenges preventing the scaling of these • Workflows. Much of the work that Agency
systems for Agency X were: X’s existing data platforms perform were
done with manual tasks. Agency X needed
• Sourcing and Sustainability. Agency X a solution that enabled the automation of
relied on building custom scrapers and data particular data workflows, starting with Senti-
integrations and soon found that sustaining ment Analysis and Influencer Reporting.
these custom connections with analytics and • Client Customization. Customizing and
application layers was messy and ad-hoc at preparing reporting and analytics for any
best. Regardless of how an agency obtained given customer was largely a manual pro-
their data, whether powered by homemade cess. The ability to create customizations
or third-party aggregators like Gnip and easily and efficiently, as well as cater analyt-
DataSift, the components and collected ics on a per-customer basis, would greatly
data were nearly impossible to maintain enhance the efficiency of Agency X teams
indefinitely as customer and project priorities and increase the speed with which teams
shifted. could deliver insights to customers.
© 2012 Infochimps, Inc. All rights reserved. 4

5. CASE STUDY
Solution
• Push Button Reporting. By leveraging
Infochimps helped Agency X strengthen and
the Hadoop suite of tools for batch analyt-
extend their listening and insights platform by
ics, as well as the Infochimps Data Delivery
leveraging the Infochimps Platform, tools, and
System (based on Apache Flume) for real-
expertise to unify data sources, process data
time streaming analytics, Agency X can
streams, and visualize insights in real-time, all
develop analysis and subsequent reports
while satisfying on-demand internal reporting
on the fly for high customer responsiveness.
needs.
The power and simplicity of the Infochimps
analytics tools make it easier to develop and
• System Unification within a Flexible Big
productionize analysis and reporting.
Data Infrastructure. By taking advantage of
• Modular Analytics Development. By us-
Big Data tools and Ironfan as the provision-
ing the Infochimps Data Delivery Service
ing, configuration, and updates foundation,
(based on Apache Flume) and “decorators,”
Agency X can scale to any volume of ap-
Agency X can add any number of additional
plications, reporting, and data collection. All
analytics enhancements as their feature set
applications, reporting, and data are con-
grows. These enhancements are modular,
nected as part of one unified, modular sys-
meaning Agency X can customize features
tem.
depending on the customer’s needs, and
• Peace of Mind. Infochimps hosts, main-
new analytics can be added without disrup-
tains, and monitors the underlying system
tion to previously developed metrics.
architecture and tools to greatly minimize
the operational resources and mindshare
that Agency X must allocate to infrastruc-
ture support. Simply put - it just works.
© 2012 Infochimps, Inc. All rights reserved. 5

6. CASE STUDY
Infochimps Platform Benefits Working with Infochimps
The Infochimps Platform provided these key Infochimps has built a plug-and-play platform,
benefits to Agency X: provides all the data you could want from our
data marketplace at your fingertips, and we’ve
• Diminished operations burden allowing got the experts to make it all just work.
them to focus on building products, not
machines Big Data Experts. We built a uniquely powerful
• Sustainable, scalable systems powered data system that could ingest and deliver mas-
by best-in-class technologies like Ha- sive quantities of data while performing com-
doop, Flume, Elasticsearch, and more. plex, resource-intensive analytics in order to
• Infochimps hosting, maintenance and create and maintain our market-leading catalog
administration, support, skills transfer, of thousands of data sets and APIs. Now, com-
and Big Data strategy and methodology. panies looking to gain insights big data come
• A system that is easy to change, grow, to us to leverage our platform, experience and
and manage expertise. Underlying those offerings are a set
• Built on a foundation of open-source of cutting edge Infochimps’ technologies and
technologies. tools, including Ironfan and Wukong, as well as
• Agile infrastructure development - their key partnerships.
infrastructure is defined with descriptive
code. This enables fast iterations, test- Integrated. Infochimps’ experience and tool de-
ability, and flexibility. velopment in all the other aspects of Big Data,
• Modularity and customizability, allowing from ingestion and conditioning to low-friction
them to respond dynamically to changing delivery (in the form of our API platform), means
business or customer requirements. that the team understands and is equipped with
• Powerful analytics capabilities the tools to successfully navigate and trouble-
• Batch Big Data analytics with Hadoop shoot the entire Big Data ecosystem of an
and related tools. organization.
• Streaming (real-time) Big Data analytics
powered by Apache Flume and enhance-
ments added by Infochimps’ Data Deliv-
ery Service.
© 2012 Infochimps, Inc. All rights reserved. 6

7. CASE STUDY
Flexible Cost. Infochimps helps companies
manage costs with infrastructure agnosticism.
Want to pay for just what you need? We can
leverage the flexibility of Infrastructure as a
Service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon Web
Services and the Rackspace Cloud. Now, all
infrastructure costs can be operating expenses
(use what you need) and not capital expendi-
tures (pay for infrastructure whether you need
it or not). Switching from CapEx to OpEx can
dramatically lower the funding barrier to adopt-
ing Big Data internally in an enterprise. Got
bare metal? We’ll set you up with OpenStack
and Ironfan so you can create your own flexible,
highly-efficient infrastructure environment.
Context. Perhaps best of all, the Infochimps
Platform can be used to provide context to
enterprise’s internal data, whether through
public opinion mining (via social networks),
geo-located information of many varieties, word
corpus training for machine learning, and other
commonly useful (but difficult to accumulate)
data. All those capabilities combine to make us
a great choice for providing Big Data services
to the budget and process-conscious enterprise
customer.
© 2012 Infochimps, Inc. All rights reserved. 7

8. About Infochimps
Our mission is to make the world’s data more accessible.
Infochimps helps companies understand their data. We provide
tools and services that connect their internal data, leverage the
power of cloud computing and new technologies such as Hadoop,
and provide a wealth of external datasets, which organizations
can connect to their own data.
Contact Us
Infochimps, Inc.
1214 W 6th St. Suite 202
Austin, TX 78703
1-855-DATA-FUN (1-855-328-2386)
www.infochimps.com
info@infochimps.com
Twitter: @infochimps
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© 2012 Infochimps, Inc. All rights reserved. 8