When you were a kid, did you dress up as a unicorn for Halloween? Did you ever imagine you were a fairy living at the bottom of your garden? Maybe your dreams can come true! Modern-day marketers need a variety of complementary (and sometimes conflicting) skill sets. Forbes and others have started talking about unicorns, a rare breed of marketer--marketing technologists who understand both marketing and marketing technology. A good marketing analyst is part of this new breed; a unicorn isn't a horse with a horn but truly a new breed. It is no longer enough to be good at coding in SAS^®--or a whiz with Excel--and to know a few marketing buzzwords. In this session, we explore the skills an analyst needs to turn himself or herself into one of these mythical, highly sought-after creatures.

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SAS^® Customer Intelligence 360 is the new cloud-based customer data gathering application that uses the Amazon Web Services Cloud as a hosting platform. Learn how you can instrument your mobile application to gather usage data from your users as well as provide targeted application content based on either customer behavior or marketing campaigns.

SAS^® Event Stream Processing is designed to analyze and process large volumes of streaming data in motion. SAS Event Stream Processing provides a browser-based user interface that enables you to create and test event stream processing models in a visual drop-and-drag environment. This environment delivers a highly interactive and intuitive user experience. This paper describes the visual, interactive interface for building models and monitoring event stream activity. It also provides examples to demonstrate how you can easily build a model using the graphical user interface of SAS Event Stream Processing. In these examples, SAS Event Stream Processing serves as the front end to process high-velocity streams. On the back end, SAS^® Real-Time Decision Manager consumes events and makes the final decision to push the suited offer to the customer. This paper explains the concepts of windows, retention, edges, and connector. It also explains how SAS Event Stream Processing integrates with SAS Real-Time Decision Manager.

Real-time, integrated marketing solutions are a necessity for maintaining your competitive advantage. This presentation provides a brief overview of three SAS products (SAS^® Marketing Automation, SAS^® Real-Time Decision Manager, and SAS^® Event Stream Processing) that form a basis for building modern, real-time, interactive marketing solutions. It presents typical (and also possible) customer-use cases that you can implement with a comprehensive real-time interactive marketing solution, in major industries like finance (banking), telco, and retail. It demonstrates typical functional architectures that need to be implemented to support business cases (how solution components collaborate with customer's IT landscape and with each other). And it provides examples of our experience in implementing these solutions--dos and don'ts, best practices, and what to expect from an implementation project.

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This presentation describes the new SAS^® Customer Intelligence 360 solution for multi-armed bandit analysis of controlled experiments. Multi-armed bandit analysis has been in existence since the 1950s and is sometimes referred to as the K- or N-armed bandit problem. In this problem, a gambler at a row of slot machines (sometimes known as 'one-armed bandits') has to decide which machines to play, as well as the frequency and order in which to play each machine with the objective of maximizing returns. In practice, multi-armed bandits have been used to model the problem of managing research projects in a large organization. However, the same technology can be applied within the marketing space where, for example, variants of campaign creatives or variants of customer journey sub-paths are compared to better understand customer behavior by collecting their respective response rates. Distribution weights of the variants are adjusted as time passes and conversions are observed to reflect what customers are responding to, thus optimizing the performance of the campaign. The SAS Customer Intelligence 360 analytic engine collects data at regularly scheduled time intervals and processes it through a simulation engine to return an updated weighting schema. The process is automated in the digital space and led through the solution's content serving and execution engine for interactive communication channels. Both marketing gains and costs are studied during the process to illustrate the business value of multi-arm bandit analysis. SAS^® has coupled results from traditional A/B testing to feed the multi-armed bandit engine, which are presented.

SAS^® Customer Intelligence 360 enables marketers to create activity maps to delight customers with a consistent experience on digital channels such as web, mobile, and email. Activity maps enable the user to create a customer journey across digital channels and assign conversion measures as individual customers and prospects navigate the customer experience. This session details how those interactions are constructed in terms of what types of interactions tasks are supported and how those interaction tasks can be related to each other in a visual paradigm with built-in goal splits, analytics, wait periods, and A/B testing. Business examples are provided for common omni-channel problems such as cross-selling and customer segmentation. In addition, we cover the integration of SAS^® Marketing Automation and other marketing products, which enables sites to leverage their current segments and treatments for the digital channels.

Omnichannel, and the omniscient customer experience, is most commonly used as a buzzword to describe the seamless customer experience in a traditional multi-channel marketing and sales environment. With more channels and methods of communication, there is a growing need to establish a more customer-centric way of dealing with all customer interactions, not only 1:1. Telenor, based out of Norway, is one of the world's major mobile operators with in excess of 200 million mobile subscriptions throughout 13 markets across Europe and Asia. The Norwegian home-market is a highly saturated and mature market in which customer demands and expectations are constantly rising. To deal with this and with increased competition, two major initiatives were established together with SAS^®. The initiatives aimed to leverage both the need for real-time analytics and decision management in our inbound channel, and for creating an omnichannel experience across inbound and outbound channels. The projects were aimed at both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) markets. With significant legacy of back-end systems and a complex value chain it was important to both improve the customer experience and simplify customer treatment, all without impacting the back-end system at large. The presentation sheds light on how the projects worked to meet the technical challenges alongside the need for an optimal customer experience. With results far exceeding expectations, the outcome has established the basis for further Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) initiatives to strengthen both Net Promoter Score/Customer loyalty and revenue.

For marketers who are responsible for identifying the best customer to target in a campaign, it is often daunting to determine which media channel, offer, or campaign program is the one the customer is more apt to respond to, and therefore, is more likely to increase revenue. This presentation examines the components of designing campaigns to identify promotable segments of customers and to target the optimal customers using SAS^® Marketing Automation integrated with SAS^® Marketing Optimization.